[WikiEN-l] Do experts have a moral obligation to contribute to Wikipedia?

[WJhonson at aol.com]

But who is heard when people read a Wikipedia article?  *An expert* is  not 
heard, that is, no particular expert is heard, because we have no  
attribution.  Cited sources are heard, where sources are cited, for a  particular 
sentence.  But even then we get citation creep when those  sentences are not 
enquoted.  That is, people will modify or hitch a ride on  a sentence with 
additional quips not found in the underlying source.
 
So in our Marilyn Monroe article we *had* cited a source claiming that her  
father's country of origin was cited as Norway on her birth certificate.   
Which is a claim with no evidence.  And the source cited, did not state  
this either.  Someone had hitched that "Norway" onto a sentence which had  
simply read that her father's name was Mortenson on her birth cert.  A  casual 
reader cannot disentangle these overlying changes, but may assume this is  
the voice of the cited expert.  I fail to see how when reading any of our  
articles, a person is actually reading the words of any particular expert.
 
In a *relatively few* articles sources are cited and the actual extracted  
sentence is enquoted.  Those I find the most useful, as you can be fairly  
sure the source actually states what the quoted sentence states, without  
repeating the look-up.
 
Will Johnson
 
 
 
In a message dated 8/2/2009 9:24:53 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
lunasantin at gmail.com writes:

I don't  think I'd ever go chiding someone over it, but he brings up a solid
point:  if you hope to be heard, you need to speak in such a way that people
will  listen -- this may sometimes include speaking *where* people  will
listen.

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