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phoebe ayers

17 Dec 2009 17 Dec '09

10:27 p.m.

interesting quick article about the trials and tribulations of other open access encyclopedia projects: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/14/encyclopedias -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *

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Charles Matthews

19 Dec 19 Dec

10:34 a.m.

phoebe ayers wrote:

interesting quick article about the trials and tribulations of other open access encyclopedia projects: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/14/encyclopedias

Quite a lot there about plato.stanford.edu (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), which certainly seems highly reputable and a reliable source, though I'm not in a position to judge it as a professional. Not mentioned is eom.springer.de (Encyclopaedia of Mathematics from Springer), which is very useful for referencing things. But has some typical problems related to the article's concerns, and to our own views on experts. There is the matter of updating: if you look at http://eom.springer.de/F/f038390.htm and http://eom.springer.de/F/f110070.htm you can see that they haven't bothered to merge to update on Fermat's Last Theorem; just added http://eom.springer.de/F/f110060.htm. http://eom.springer.de/S/s120140.htm on the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture manages not to mention FLT as corollary. Having one author per article seems clumsy in these circumstances. The basic encyclopedia is translated from a Soviet-era publication. While overall the coverage is still more respectable than ours, in some ways, there are some issues one can see with POV in the additional articles they have commissioned. I can see us overtaking it eventually in quality. Charles

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Charles Matthews

20 Dec 20 Dec

10:59 a.m.

New subject: Citing open reference works, was article about open access encyclopedias

phoebe ayers wrote:

interesting quick article about the trials and tribulations of other open access encyclopedia projects: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/14/encyclopedias

In another direction, I'm interested in the issues we have in citing online reference works. (a) We do want permalinks if possible and don't want link rot. It seems that such works generally do not provide permalinks. (b) There is the general {{cite web}} template, but it is cumbersome. There is an "access date" field but that can only be a compromise solution, if there is no permalink. (c) For older works that are now in the public domain, the "correct" solution is to place the material in Wikisource, support it with proof reading and bibliographic details (including author information) over there, and link to it via interwiki rather than URL. That is, Wikisource should be the repository used by default for older material such as Britannica 1911. We are, though, a long way from even linking to existing articles there in preference to external links. (d) Generally, instead of {{cite web}}, each commonly-used external reference cited should have a dedicated template for linking. Unlike some other areas, the drive for common standards seems not to have taken off here. Charles

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Carcharoth

5 Jan 5 Jan

4:51 a.m.

New subject: Citing open reference works, was article about open access encyclopedias

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:

phoebe ayers wrote:

interesting quick article about the trials and tribulations of other open access encyclopedia projects: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/14/encyclopedias

In another direction, I'm interested in the issues we have in citing online reference works. (a) We do want permalinks if possible and don't want link rot. It seems that such works generally do not provide permalinks. (b) There is the general {{cite web}} template, but it is cumbersome. There is an "access date" field but that can only be a compromise solution, if there is no permalink. (c) For older works that are now in the public domain, the "correct" solution is to place the material in Wikisource, support it with proof reading and bibliographic details (including author information) over there, and link to it via interwiki rather than URL. That is, Wikisource should be the repository used by default for older material such as Britannica 1911. We are, though, a long way from even linking to existing articles there in preference to external links. (d) Generally, instead of {{cite web}}, each commonly-used external reference cited should have a dedicated template for linking. Unlike some other areas, the drive for common standards seems not to have taken off here.

Bumping this because it's been sitting unread in my inbox for ages, and I think there are interesting things said here that should be discussed. Er, how about: how much do people here use wikisource. I think it is a great resource that gets under-used. Or pick up one of the point Charles made above, for example, how to motivate and start a drive for standards in citing common external references (I'm not sure if Charles means templates to wikisource, templates to other online stuff, or templates producing a formatted reference to a book). Carcharoth

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Charles Matthews

10:43 a.m.

New subject: Citing open reference works, was article about open access encyclopedias

Carcharoth wrote:

Er, how about: how much do people here use wikisource. I think it is a great resource that gets under-used.

Oh, Wikisource is coming. Be afraid, be very afraid. But Wikisource reminds me (not in a bad way) of Wikipedia five years ago: lot of potential, things not quite gelling yet particularly as far as navigation is concerned

Or pick up one of the point Charles made above, for example, how to motivate and start a drive for standards in citing common external references (I'm not sure if Charles means templates to wikisource, templates to other online stuff, or templates producing a formatted reference to a book).

I dislike what we have in the way of generic book and web templates. But there may be nothing much to be done at the "generic" end of the scale. What I'm suggesting is that the "specific" end of the scale be considered. There are numerous standard online sources; some standard book sources, e.g. EB 1911, are migrating to Wikisource. There are the twin points that citations to standard sources are much better packaged up in specific templates; and from our point of view a specific template that takes you to the Wikisource version is ideal (for example, a typo can be fixed on Wikisource). What would be very nice would be something analogous to the redesign of the tags for the tops of articles done a few years ago, where they all became coded by colour. Currently there are numerous such templates, but no uniformity. Charles

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Carcharoth
Charles Matthews
phoebe ayers