On 27/09/2010 04:13, Carcharoth wrote:
<snip>
There is plenty of obscure stuff that you still have
to look up behind
paywalls, or look for specialised publications (books and journals and
monographs). I find myself coming across stuff like that all the time,
but it is true that Wikipedia is often a convenient *starting* point
for digging deeper. But if I don't find what I want on Wikipedia, I
keep looking.
Indeed. "Comprehensive" is important, but "inclusive
of starting points
for research" rather more so. Think of the difference between "stub" and
"FA" in those terms and you're getting somewhere. I think CZ missed a
trick by not getting the whole gamut.
Of the free (i.e. non-paywall) sources available, the
best for my purposes is often the book scans found at
archive.org and
on Google Books. In theory, as anyone can access those, they will
eventually be used to source Wikipedia articles, but for obscure
subjects that will take a very long time.
That seems not to be quite right. The
recent gadget to locate our
sources of links found Google Books at the top of the heap. My own
researches show that Google Books is quite intensively used for
referencing, for just such "obscure subjects". I do have my own axe to
grind here (basically
archive.org material being sent to Wikisource for
much better presentation); but that is what takes time. Traditional
chaos still reigns, but our purposes tend to make sense of what is out
there.
Charles