User:Ocaasi/Questiablog

'The Wikipedia Library' adds Questia; Credo expanded; JSTOR signups begun

Since 2011 Wikipedia editors and several paid online research databases have formed a symbiotic relationshiop. The databases donate free account access to select editors, often numbering in the hundreds or more, and in return they gain the good will of the community, awareness of their services among some of our most active and influential editors, references in articles, and a bit of positive press (like this blog post).

The newest addition to the resource offerings is Questia, an online research library for books and journal articles focusing on the humanities and social sciences. Questia has curated titles from over 300 trusted publishers, including 77,000 full-text books and 4 million journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, as well as encyclopedia entries. Paid access to Questia would cost $99 per year, but Questia donated 1000 free 1 year accounts to Wikipedia, a service worth $100,000 were editors to individually pay for that access.

Questia is owned by Cengage Learning, the same company which owns HighBeam Reference. In 2012 HighBeam donated 1,000 1-year accounts as well.

Joe Miller: What did you learn from the HighBeam collaboration that made you want to expand your offering into Questia?

The results from the first 3 months of the HighBeam partnership were impressive.

Accounts were given out at the end of March, 2012. In the two months before the partnership began there were an average 68 references per month to HighBeam. In the 3 months following the donation, there were an average of 480 references per month. That's an average increase of 412 references to HighBeam per month, and a change of 600%.

Joe Miller: How is Questia different from HighBeam?

HighBeam and Questia were also joined by Credo Reference, which added 350 resources to their offerings and 125 more accounts, bringing the total to 500.

A partnership with JSTOR for full access for 100 editors is in the final stages of organization and will hopefully be rolling out soon. Initiated by the Featured Article writers on English Wikipedia and spearheaded by Steven Walling at the Wikimedia Foundation, JSTOR represents a huge potential benefit with its offerings of extensive archive of academic papers.

In August 2008, Wikipedia editor Ocaasi grouped these 4 offerings under the heading of The Wikipedia Library. At first the Library's purpose is merely to coordinate these varied donations and streamline the account promotion, sign-ups, distribution, and management process. Grander plans are in the works, however, with the ultimate goal being a single sign-on, a portal through which approved editors could access all participating resource donors with a single logon.

Ocaasi said, "The dream is to equip Wikipedia editors with no less than the best sources available at any major University library. And the problem with our current framework is that it just doesn't scale well.  Each new partnership requires a full re-investment in organization; with a single sign-on point, editors would be free to roam in and out the entire community of houses, rather than needing a separate key for each gate and door, and Wikipedia Library organizers wouldn't have to needlessly duplicate their work for each new resource."

The Wikipedia Library was proposed by Ocaasi for a Community Fellowship. So far 30 editors have endorsed the idea, a significant number given the response to typical proposals. Editor Yunshui wrote, "This is a monumentally good idea...Not only would a central library allow users to apply for multiple permissions to different journal aggregators and archives, it would also probably alert them to sources that they might never have encountered otherwise. It would provide a jumping off point for all sorts of research, and encourage the development of more articles, greatly increasing the amount of free information available to the general public. I can't see any way in which this would not benefit the encyclopedia."

Editor The Interior added, "This is a direction the community needs to move in. Volunteers provide their time and expertise, the project needs to provide the tools to help them create the best quality content possible." And, prolific contributor Dr. Blofeld wrote of The Wikipedia Library idea, saying it was "Arguably one of the most important things you could do to improve wikipedia as a resource in the long term."

Despite broad support and enthusiasm for the idea, the technical hurdles are substantial. Developing the infrastructure to support single sign-on would require 6 months of full-time developer support, according to Wikimedia Foundation Operations Engineer and Wikimedia Labs [head] Ryan Lane. Lane responded to the idea that development could be taken on by a volunteer rather than a paid staffer or contractor. He wrote, "This is a pretty large project for a volunteer. It would be much better if this was a funded short-term contract. The foundation doesn't have budget for this, at least for this year. My recommendation is to reach out to some chapters for funding, if they are interested in the project. We can look at adding this to the budget for next year, if a chapter doesn't take interest."

Head of the Community Fellowships program Siko Bouterse commented on the proposal talk page, "We don't have everything in place to make this particular dream a reality yet. And I agree that sucks, because of course it is a good idea."