Talk:Israel Exploration Journal

Re PROD tag

A note for whoever added the PROD tag. Good on you for your work in keeping Wiki tidy. Regarding this article, HANG ON.

Please note that this stub was added to the WikiProject Academic Journals by someone other than me, who opened the article. Please also note that Wiki has a long list of thousands of Journals that do not have any article. IEJ is a well known journal to academics who work in the area. It is peer-reviewed and hence what it publishes are considered reliable sources by Wiki. To make such sources accessable to lay readers, it is helpful to have articles that specify things like the frequency of journals, the organization that publishes them, the editorial committee, the year they were first published, any geographic, political or sectarian affiliation and so on. Ideally, a list of all articles published by date (often available from websites) can also be included.

Currently, I am slowly working at a long term project of providing a list of the hundred or so most cited theological and related journals. That happens to be my personal area of research. I am sourcing these from WorldCat and providing ISSNs for them. A few other editors have expressed interest and have been helping provide info boxes and such like for various articles.

Because journal articles are a key component in verifying information at Wiki, we need all the information about them we can get. It requires volunteer time from editors. The more structure we can provide, the more we motivate contributions.

Since this particular article has been "prodded", I'll put in an info box and more info. However, I simply do not have time to do this for all the stubs I have created and intend to create. It is an achievable goal for me to put lists and stubs in place to motivate others to contribute, especially those who deal more regularly with particular journals than I do. If all the article stubs I create are prodded, most will be deleted, and then the list I've been building will look sketchy. That list may then get proposed for deletion. Simply because there are so many theological journals, but so few people contributing articles on them, even the little we have will get deleted -- very demotivating for anyone who may want to try working it up from scratch again.

In short, IEJ is a particularly well known journal to scholars in the field. It already has context at Wiki -- the publishing society, the list of theological journals, and citations at a few articles.

Look at the skyline of a big city CBD, most of them look "messy" because skyscrapers take years to build. The bigger the project, the longer it takes, and it looks ugly while under construction. How much more so big Wiki projects depending on the contributions of volunteers! If there are proceedures at Wiki for setting up project pages etc, etc that I should know about, please point me in that direction. I will get around to dropping in on the Academic Journal WikiProject. Perhaps they would be happy to support a small, slow moving work group covering theological journals.

Cheers. Alastair Haines 04:59, 19 September 2007 (UTC)