Publishing the Forum

[Tim Simmons]

I have to say, I have been thinking along the lines of starting afresh for a project like this, with plenty of time to invite contributors.

[not2sharp]

Step one would be to locate a storage site for a large number of photos and agree on a standard size, format, and presentation. If were were using these forums as a tool, I would also suggest creating a site with many major forums (one per region), many subforums (by tribe or types of weapons), and then restricting posting privileges for each major forum to only the committee entrusted with organizing the presentation for that area.

A forum for Nepal, might include subforums for Khukuris, Koras, Ram Dao, and Other; with individual threads addressing each specific classification. For instance, under Nepal\khukuris, you can post a thread titled M43 and attach a text discription and all of the photos illustrating variations and markings on the M43 pattern khukuri.

The photos would be added by contributing members to the photo hosting site and then the link would be forwarded to the relevant committee via PM. The committee would decide which photos to use and each photo used would be credited to a contributor unless otherwise requested.

Whatever debate or differences of opinion arise over the various classifications would be worked out on the main forum on a free debate open to all members. The objective would be to create a learning tool rather then a finished work. It would be organized in the sense that it had structure; but, it would remain a living tool subject to such changes as the teams deem relevant or helpful.

n2s

[Rick]

Who will pay for all this ?

[Rivkin]

I think that there are a few proposals here on the table and we need to decide which one to follow. I am against splitting of the forum.

In my opinion we need a formal internet journal. This is not a new thing, there are some really good ones out there. It is surprising that such places like http://www.arxiv.org/ while not having peer-review or editors are very popular since they give you good service (tracking of papers by subjects etc) and do not require the copyright transfer, therefore enabling authors to post selected published papers.

I believe that our journal can pursue the following goals:

a. Publishing proceeding of the conference(s). Standard practice in all conferences.
b. Publishing "review articles". "Review" article is the one that takes already existing discussion and reviews the situation in the field, while not pretending to be original, copyrighted material. These "reviews" can be both invited by the editorial stuff by contacting principal contributors of certain threads, and also written by voluunters.

In 2000-2004 forum 90% of pictures are gone, ebay auctions long deleted, external links broken and one can only guess what Artzi meant by features of "this" jambiya. This will sooner or later happen to 2005-2008 forum as well, unless we preserve the contribution in series of well defined documents, for which, I think, article form is most suitable.

c. Journal for contributed papers. Suppose one of us would like to write an article about kerises. Where one can publish it so it will be read by fellow keris enthusiast, easily accesable, archived and probably even reviewed? Ofcoarse there are historical journals and the Journal of Military Science, but they have a very different goal and ideology. There is also a journal of contemporary ethnography, but their reviewers will probably ask the author to elaborate on the role of pamor in cementing gender roles in contemporary Macao. Moreover, most of arms and armour papers end up in some obscure national journals, and then if one wants to get some constantly referenced Gorelik paper one has to spent a few days to finally figure out that this journal does not circulate outside of Moscow. I understand, that even if we advertise our journal, we will not see huge crowds descending on us with contributions, but I think we are lacking a specialized journal.

Now, Mr. McDougall published his article on USMC mamluk sword - now imagine it buried somewhere in the 1999 archive of the forum, stripped from pictures. Would it be as accesible or interesting ?

Now to the great fears of commiting to incomplete research and possible errors.
There is a classic book on caucasian rugs by Uhlrman. Mistakes in it are truly collosal (for example, Shamil is a cherkes), it helped to fix a highly bizzare geographical names for caucasian rugs - the area between Tbilisi and Erevan is referred to as "Kazak" - not to be mistaken with Cossack or Kazakh. But did this book contribute to the field? Yes, it is one of the definitive works that provided the basis for caucasian rugs' study and classifications. Its errors were later recognized and partially corrected, but without this contribution even correcting such errors would not have been possible, for there would have be no big push on the subject.

Even great articles on theoretical math contain errors, one would expect more so in our field.

In addition, I think such endevour would require a minimal effort from the site's stuff - set up a separate section, then it would be up to editors and the community to develop submission guidelines, and once every 3 months or so to produce series of pdfs containing individual articles. If these reviews will be interesting enough, one can later put them together into a book. Concerning copyrights, adhering to standards, etc - it is all the author's responsibility to do so.

[Rivkin]

Here is what I belive can be a good example for us:
http://www.rugreview.com/orr.htm