[WikiEN-l] Citing open reference works, was article about open access encyclopedias

[Charles Matthews]

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