Proposal:SourceIt

From Strategic Planning
Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content.
  3. Increase Participation.
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



Summary

Many encyclopedic topics or facts are actually lacking valid references, which Wikipedia suffers from. There is thus need for a journal which would publish articles on unaddressed topics.


Proposal

Typically, this would concern what would be called original research on Wikipedia, but would not need actual research ; thus the articles wouldn't be considered as primary sources. However one can also consider such more complex topics which would require actual research, and publish them as primary sources in a different section of the project, hoping they would be picked up elsewhere.

The process would be the following :

  1. A topic or fact is not properly sourced on Wikipedia.
  2. Wikipedia contributors or readers file a request on this project for this topic or fact to be addressed.
  3. The project contributors contact researchers or experts in this field, who can redirect them to more expert people.
  4. The expert writes an article addressing the issue.
  5. The article is published (it may be peer-reviewed before).
  6. The initial topic or fact can now be properly sourced.


Motivation

Many encyclopedic topics or facts are lacking valid references. Thus on Wikipedia they are either left unreferenced, which has a bad impact on its reliability, or simply removed, which impacts its completeness.


Key Questions

I believe this addresses a different issue than Proposal:Journal (A peer-review journal to allow/encourage academics to write Wikipedia articles).

This proposal is also advertised on meta.


Potential Costs

I guess experts would have to be rewarded for their articles. Depending on the publication rate, the cost would probably be the same as for a webnewspaper.


Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:SourceIt.


Want to work on this proposal?

  1. .. Sign your name here!