Forum:Conlang

New peer-reviewed journal subwiki
Much of the discussion at Wikipedia:Conlangs, and on some of the VfD debates, has centered around the lack of verifiability for many articles about artlangs due to the fact that no one has written about them except their authors; this is partly due to the fact that the zines devoted to conlangs died long ago and for the last few years we've had pretty much only the mailing lists and Zompist Bulletin Board as venues for discussion of conlangs, which don't serve quite the same purpose as a journal publishing in-depth articles (like Rick Harrison's Journal of Planned Languages or Steve Brewer's Journal of Unnecessary Languages). It would make sense to publish original research on various artlangs in the conlang wikicity, and at some point later, if it seems warranted, do articles at Wikipedia for the most notable of them.

I propose that we start a peer-reviewed journal here. The structure might be something like this:


 * 1) A main page that would have links to the most recently published articles, with brief excerpts from them, and links to an archive page that has links to all articles ever.
 * 2) A submissions page where people put links to new articles, and where peer reviewers record comments and votes. The author can revise the article in response to peer comments.  If after some period 2/3 of the commenting reviewers approve the article, it goes to the published articles section on the main page and the archive.  If it fails to get supermajority approval, it goes to another archive, and if it gets maybe 2/3 votes against it may be deleted.
 * 3) A drafts page where authors can put wikilinks to new articles in progress, later moving the links to the submissions page when they consider the article finished.

The idea is that these articles will be mostly written by people other than the creator of the conlang in question, and they need not be NPOV or avoid original research like articles at Wikipedia. Articles by conlang creators would be welcome too, especially replies to earlier-published articles about their languages by other people, but also articles about the process of creating language X and what they learned from it, etc. --Jim Henry 17:19, 12 Aug 2005 (UTC)