Talk:WikiJournal User Group/Starting a journal

Who controls the journal?

Generally speaking, the editors resolve their own disputes. On rare occasions the discussion reaches the level of the Curators, Custodians, and Bureaucrats, but it almost never goes higher than that. On Wikipedia, most decisions are made by the loosely organized group of editors who happen to be active on a given article, and on Wikiversity it is not uncommon for pages to be under the authority of a single editor who informally "owns" the page (almost).

This loose and decentralized management scheme is insufficient for a journal because a journal needs to protect its reputation among the readers, who need to know that the articles are accurate, and among the contributing authors, who need assurance that appropriate submissions will be accepted, and that the journal will not degrade itself in the future by accepting inappropriate articles. Moreover, a good reputation among the referees must be sustained.

For this reason, the board needs to formally or informally understand how the day-to-day decisions are made. And, the community needs to understand that a journal is not a typical resource that outsiders are free to modify. However, page protection is rarely required if there is no threat of persistent vandalism.

The one exception involves pages with data that has a low tolerance for minor editing errors. This is especially a concern for WikiJournal of Science, which is structured so that its articles are scattered throughout all the wikis. At a minimum, this index containing all the article links should be page protected. In the future, if journals ever become routinely used in courses, it might be wise to protect the abstracts as well. With regard to abstracts, both the WikiJournal of Science and the Wikiversity Journal of Medicine are equivalent in that each abstract points to three versions of the article: (1) the permalink and (2) its PDF copy, as well as (3) the editable wiki.

--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 13:25, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

@Guy vandegrift: In Wikiversity Journal of Medicine, the control is, in practice, currently that I have the associated pages on my watchlist, and revert any vandalism. Still, I think the journal will have better reputation if the pages are edit protected. I've previously requested to have the articles edit protected (here), but it was then denied because no vandalism had occurred yet, and since then I've only had one case. I think the practice of linking directly to a static oldid version would serve Wikiversity Journal of Medicine well, since it can be implemented right now. I will shortly bring this idea to the editorial board. Readers can still spot and easily correct minor spelling or grammar errors in the latest version. Mikael Häggström (discuss • contribs) 21:09, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

We have a new Curator status that you are eligivle for. I pinged you on that request.