Dear Don,

Thanks for your post.

Two quick thoughts.

1) She Ji makes use of the article+commentary format of Brain and Behavioral Sciences. While we cannot yet do this for all articles, we do use it for some articles. For example, the forthcoming issue has an article by Karin Lindgaard and Heico Wesselius titled "Once More, with Feeling: Design Thinking and Embodied Cognition.” Along with the article, we have a major series of comments by Alissa Antle, Angela Leung and Lin Qiu, Bo Christensen, Roberto Verganti, Lawrence Barsalou, Kees Dorst, and Gabriela Goldschmidt.

In addition, we welcome letters to the editor. We don’t get many, but we’re happy to publish serious letters when people send them.

2) Wikipedia is both a useful resource — and a problem. It has been my experience that many Wikipedia participants — editors, in the Wikipedia system — do *not* follow the Wikipedia rules. The rules are complex, not all editors know them, and many Wikipedians substitute their own judgement for properly cited sources. This is especially the case in fields where Wikipedia editors have strong feelings — rather than adhere to the Wikipedia system, engaging in proper conversation in the back page forums and responding to queries on their edits, they simply make the changes they wish. After a couple of rounds of edits and reverts on an article where I followed the rules and the editors did not, I gave up as a Wikipedia contributor. Simply because I have something of an interdisciplinary background, I see many articles where I have no personal investment in the content where I could add appropriate references, develop sources, expand the content. My experience has been so unpleasant that I don’t bother. The time one invests, for example, in revising incorrect bibliographic entries or adding resources, can be overturned at will by anyone else who simply liked it better the way it was, perhaps because he or she created the earlier, incorrect version. 

I, too, use Wikipedia — lots of good material there. But I don’t contribute. They solve the scale problem at the price of curatorial excellence. 

That said, I approve of the “Wikipedia build festival” approach where a group of colleagues within a single field or discipline at different universities invest time in improving one specific field — often together with graduate students. I suspect this works well specifically because a massive build venture overwhelms the efforts of proprietary Wikipedians to control an area or field they want to “own.” Several thousand improvements in a specific field seem to override the personal opinion of proprietary editors. Careful work by a scholar or scientist citing peer reviewed sources does not work when improvements to one article offend an editor.   

There is no possibility of discussing or appealing any specific issue within the Wikipedia system. Wikipedia does things their way. There seems to be no way to engage with anyone at the Wikipedia organization itself. In this, Wikipedia is as remote and abstract as the largest corporation. 

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn 

— 

Don Norman wrote:

—snip—

BBS solves the problem by restricting the comments to invited commentators.
It is also static, so that once the lead article, the comments, and the
author's response to the comments has been published, there is no mechanism
for further discussion and commentary. In other words, it avoids the
scaling problem.

===

Why is this related to the future of journals? Because of scaling and
curation. There are too many articles being submitted to too many journals.
Individuals can not keep up. Referees are swamped, and they can not keep
up.  Moreover, the economics of publishing and distribution has failed. So
the old model of carefully edited and reviewed papers is failing, except
for the few major journals in each field. Moreover, even the major journals
are suffering financially, with a number continuing to exist only because
they have some wealthy sponsor -- a large membership base or some
institution such as a university. Or perhaps because they are like
"Science" or "Nature" that are so well respected that people (scientists)
find them essential reading. A few elite journals will survive. But what
about the essential, high-quality journals that by their specialist nature,
have limited readership?

What is the future for journals such as Design Issues, Design Studies,
International Journal of Design, She Ji, ....? Remember the magazine ID? It
doesn't exist anymore.

https://www.fastcompany.com/1490624/what-killed-id-magazine

Scaling. Curating. Business models.  These are the major issues facing
today's research libraries, academic publishing, and other attempts at
forming viable communities for debate and discussion of deep, substantive
topics.

—snip—


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