Is a journal based on extending Wikipedia articles feasible?

Question

A large part of the work in writing a paper in my field (theoretical CS and economics) is writing the introduction, the problem description, the motivation, and the related work. A large part of this writeup repeats in different articles studying a similar problem; thus there is a waste of effort. I thought of initiating a journal in which the authors will be instructed to base this part of their papers on relevant Wikipedia pages. Each article would start with a paragraph such as the following:

"This paper extends the Wikipedia article ABC (version from date of submission). Our contributions are as follows: (a) we prove that the ABC theorem is valid not only for $n=2$ but also for $n=3$. (b) We refute the ABC conjecture for $n=4$. (c) We present an efficient algorithm for solving the ABC problem for the case $n=2$.

The authors are responsible for ensuring that the Wikipedia article at the date of submission is uptodate, contains a complete problem statement, and all relevant related work. The referees will have to verify this. Then, the rest of the paper will be verified as usual. If the paper is published, then the new contributions will be added to the ABC page.

Advantages:

• The literature survey will be done only once, and it will be kept uptodate.
• The notation will be uniform (based on the Wikipedia article).

Current journals will probably not agree to this scheme. But can it work with a new journal? Is this scheme reasonable?

Answer 1

There are already three journals very similar to this idea:

• WikiJournal of Medicine
• WikiJournal of Science
• WikiJournal of Humanities

There is even a UserGroup in which these are operated.

Answer 2

No, this will not work. You claim

A large part of this writeup repeats in different articles studying a similar problem; thus there is a waste of effort

but the effort wasted is actually not so big compared to the extra effort required to coordinate publishing with a wiki.

Furthermore, Wikipedia users will be editing the wiki with different goals in mind than the goals of your journal's authors. Wikipedia is not meant for containing problem statements.

Answer 3

Yes, this will work. (If you do it, you will see that this is true.)

Contrary to what the answer above wrote, it's simple and not costly to make it work because anyone can edit Wikipedia. So whatever content you want to put on Wikipedia you are allowed to put it there. Generally, and by design. You are in fact very welcome for Wikipedia is meant to be edited by anyone under any personal/selfish goals except those contrary to what is explicitly banned.

Also, notability is a completely gray concept in Wikipedia and is usually enforced this way: if you have budget for a journal you can expect your budget to pass WP:N's muster. (since the threshold has been found to be entirely subjective) One might guess that the enforcement follows the rules, but longtime users know it's the other way round. Just today I came across yet another article ("Phrasal template") that is up (notable) and has been up for over 15 years.

One small disadvantage is that someone will come alone and remove/edit your content (because anyone can edit). This is [by design] feature-not-bug as far as Wikipedia is concerned; whether there are trolls camping at your particular topic/subject is irrelevant.

It's a small con because typically every single log is kept. So all you have to do when there is a (slightest bit of) fork is to incorporate it (aka edit over) which is in fact what a wiki is all about, that is, collaboration with the world. I understand sometimes one simply does not have the time budget to bother incorporating foreign changes and deadlines are yesterday in which case you can simply revert it to your wanted version with your new patch on that thus passing the buck to the other side to do "that incorporation work" from the new outstanding version, accepting that they might also be in the same situation which means that new outstanding version may also be reverted tomorrow unincorporated.

Note that one faux pas is to revert a fork while adding no new content (and without prevailing in talkpage discussion that can get incredibly lengthy; you don't have to prevail/bother with discussion btw if you have new content to add, and in fact there are many users/accounts who have a policy of zero-discussion (which you might find helpful, depending on your goals) which is completely accepted, and Wikipedia is really huge when contrasted to SE and other forums where user types can be rounded up into 3 or 4 types at most and people/culture is only allowed to think either Left or Right, and contains probably 30 or 40 different cultures of users and more, of which only the metapedian is the most visible). Note that if you habitually do this you can actually get banned. But this is also not a con since you don't have to do that as every single log is kept so if your journal is that infrequent that between your edits there is already a fork trying to survive, you can actually just ignore the fork simply by referencing specifically the version you want (thus from the default POV, it is you trying to survive; until your next article update, which will come till your journal is dead) and articles are never complete).

Finally, re "If the paper is published, then the new contributions will be added [to the page]"; Win-win !