Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Academic Journals/Transcription

Wikisource

Journals articles is an area where our sister project Wikisource can excel, but currently is underdeveloped. There are many online projects to digitise and distribute books, poems, lyrics, sheet music, etc, etc .. but few have taken up the challenge of digitising old journals in a free to access manner. I have made a start at grouping the few existing journal articles into s:Category:Academic journals. If you know of any important journal articles that Wikipedia readers would benefit from reading in the original format, please either mention them here or upload them onto Wikisource and leave a note here. John Vandenberg 05:18, 1 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just to be clear here, what is the difference between modern open access journals and old, presumably now public domain journals? Some of the JSTOR stuff goes back to 1665 in the case of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and I often use the Astrophysics Data System to read pages from old journals. Those are digitised in the sense that they are searchable in a database, but not in the sense of being on a freely-editable system like Wikisource. You said you had looked into Wikisource, so maybe you can advise on what exactly the aim is here with regards to digitising of old content? Carcharoth 16:43, 1 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Any journal that supports open access will generally be freely accessible from the journals website. As a result, our readers can be led to the website in order to read sample journal articles in order to gain a better understand of how the journal operates. OTOH, for older PD journals we need some way to show readers what the journal actually looked like; images on commons and texts on wikisource are two ways of doing that. ADS, JSTOR and the like usually stop at providing images (or PDFs as images) and/or are not free to access. IMO it would be in our readers best interests to convert important journal articles to text which are easier to download, read & print. John Vandenberg 23:06, 1 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That sounds good. While looking around, I found Category:Magazine articles. Seems like overkill to me (though Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is the exception that proves the rule), but back in the world of journals, are there any journal articles that warrant their own articles? Carcharoth 23:40, 1 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I hadn't considered journal articles important enough that they could warrant a Wikipedia article, but im sure it can done. The best candidates for that would be articles that propose problems that are slowly answered by other scientists over time. There might be some important journal articles to be found on the Wikisource author pages here Category:Scientists - the best I have found so far is s:A Heuristic Model of the Creation and Transformation of Light originally published in Annalen der Physik. John Vandenberg 00:35, 2 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Have you seen Annus Mirabilis Papers? :-) Carcharoth 00:52, 2 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not until now; thank you, and it gets better! The second of the Annus Mirabilis Papers also has an article: Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen so we have at least one wikipedia article about a journal article.

The PDF of the english translation has big bold "copyright" all over the first page, and the second page has this:

This new Dover edition,  first 
published in 1956, is an unabridged 
and unaltered republication of the 
first: published in 1926. 
translation 
It is published through special 
arrangement with Methuen and Co., 
Ltd.,  and the estate of 
Albert Einstein. 
Manufactured 
in the United States 
of America.

The German Wikisource has deleted the page for Albert Einstein even though many of his works would satisfy the U.S. pre-1923 rule[1], but the English Wikisource allows collaborative PD translations of works originally in other languages. For a 20 page journal article like this consisting mostly of formulae it would be relatively easy to translate. John Vandenberg 04:50, 2 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Update: would you believe we already have Category:Journal articles? Have a look at the articles in there and see what you think. I particularly like On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, and Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Carcharoth 02:15, 3 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If I could chime in belatedly, I think we want to generally avoid articles at the level of specific journal articles. In general, we should only do this if the journal article really takes on a life of its own, an example is Chinua Achebe's An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". A landmark piece of literary criticism that caused a major rethinking of Joseph Conrad and colonial literature, and has done as much to cement Achebe's stature as Things Fall Apart. But I think rarely, rarely does a journal article rise to this level.

Similarly with magazine articles (as the editor responsible for "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." This is a really unusual magazine story — considered a seminal work in New Journalism, the father of the "celebrity profile" which is now ubiquitous in modern American magazines, a definitive profile of Frank Sinatra, and something that's often considered Gay Talese's most important work. Very, very rarely does a Magazine Article have this sort of influence on so many different levels. And when it does, it must really strongly state its case. When I'm done with "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" it will have almost 20 reliable sources, spread across decades. --JayHenry 04:12, 24 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Here is an example of the type of Wikisource collaboration I had in mind: Wikipedia:WikiProject Banksia/Sources ; towards the bottom they list actual journal article that they want to see in Wikisource. I would like to see us encourage efforts like this. John Vandenberg 05:14, 17 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've found an existing process used to tag wikipedia articles that would benefit from having a work transcribed onto Wikisource. The outstanding list exists in Category:Add to Wikisource, and I've added one more[2] John Vandenberg 09:11, 17 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]