[Wikimediauk-l] Question about the addition of BBC content to Wikipedia entries

[Andrew Gray]

On 10 September 2010 14:19, Martin Poulter <M.L.Poulter at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> Not a TV show, David: a radio programme in which academic experts on the
> topic are interviewed and have to talk about their research for a lay
> audience. Usually much better than the typical WP EL and probably among
> the best links in the world for for further information on the topic:
> again, depending on the human judgement of article editors.

I think the level of usefulness will in large part depend on the
subject. A programme on the Pharaoh Akhenaten is likely to be a good
external link for that article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mwsly

whilst a broad discussion on "Africa" would be much less directly
useful on the article about the continent:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545ld

The best approach here might be to try the automatic topic-matching to
Wikipedia articles, bur rather than dropping the links into the
articles - which would probably lead to at least one person getting
very upset and trying to remove them all again, and it'd be messy -
link them on the talkpages with a note explaining what /In Our Time/
is, for those editors unfamiliar with it, and asking them to decide if
it would be useful either as a "further reading" style external link,
or if it could be used as a source for developing the article itself.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk