Folks,
Would someone help me here? What is the current policy regarding linking
dates such as Birth and Death in biography articles?
Thanks,
Marc Riddell
Hi all,
The current <ref>...</ref>...<references/> system produces nice
references, but it is flawed--all the text contained in a given
reference appears in the text that the reference is linked from. For
example:
It was a sunny day on Wednesday<ref>David Smith. ''History of Wednesdays.''
History Magazine, 2019.</ref>. The next day, Thursday, was cloudy.
== References and notes ==
<references/>
(That's a very simple example, too. References start to become a lot
larger once they start to include other information and/or are
produced via a template.)
Once way I could conceive of correcting the problem is to have a
reference tag that provides only a _link_ to the note via a label and
another type of reference tag that actually _defines_ and _displays_
the note. For example:
It was a sunny day on Wednesday<ref id="smith"/>. The next day, Thursday,
was cloudy.
== References and notes ==
<reference id="smith">David Smith. ''History of Wednesdays.'' History
Magazine, 2019.</reference>
This makes the raw wikitext easier to read, since the text of the
actual reference is in the _references_ section instead of in the
page's primary content.
I think this could work ...
--Thomas Larsen
At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cool_Wall we had a complete list
of cars which appear on the BBC Top Gear "Cool Wall". I removed this
as being almost certainly a violation of copyright. It is now being
argued that reproducing the list in full does not violate copyright,
because it is not published in the show's magazine or on the website
and has been compiled by collating the lists from numerous shows. It
is further asserted that compiling the list from these shows does not
constitute original research, although there is no known reliable
secondary source for any of the data, let alone the complete collated
list
Original research? You decide.
Copyright? I think so, but what do I know?
Fancruft? Ooooh, tricky :-)
Guidance appreciated.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG
<<In a message dated 1/6/2009 7:26:34 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
cbeckhorn(a)fastmail.fm writes:
That's exactly my point. There is no lack of academic analysis of
politicians, of artists, etc. But we do not seem to use any of it.
For example, I can find numerous articles on George W. Bush on JStor.
And once he is out of office there will be no lack of biogaphies written
to analyze his presidency. >>
First to attack your second point, why does W have to be out of office to
have a biography ? There are several books about Bush out, which analyze his
presidency.
Secondly, are you actually willing to admit that you are complaining about
something you're not willing to fix yourself?
YOU my friend, if you can cite all these articles from Jstor, then do so!
I personally have no access to Jstor, and I assume that the vast majority of
our editors probably don't either.
But regardless of that, I'm sure people cite what they can access and think
is relevant.
I do not (in any way) feel that "academics" have any toe-hold on
"biography". In fact, professional writers, tend not to be in academia at all, and they
write prose that is much more interesting (apparently from their book sales)
then academics.
We are not an academic encyclopedia anymore than we are a science one, a
religion one or a fancruft one. In trying to represent the world as it is, we
must use what resources are present. In general, for biographies, newspapers
and hard-cover biographies, are much more *present* and readable than
anything in a humanities journal. We're not trying to be technical as we can be,
we're also trying to attract more readership.
So again it's a balance. But by *ALL* means, if you have peer-reviewed
biographical material, add it. However "peer review" is not necessarily the
standard for all articles. TV Guide is not "peer reviewed" and yet we assume
it's a reliable source for what's on TV
Will Johnson
**************New year...new news. Be the first to know what is making
headlines. (http://www.aol.com/?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000026)
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On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Anthony wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>>
>> As will surprise none of the Knol nay-sayers here (in which number I
>> believe I can count myself), Knol hasn't done too great.
>
> Compared to what? I can't imagine Knol is much worse than Wikipedia when it
> was 6 months old. Knol just published its 100,000th article. When
> Wikipedia was 5 months old, it said on the main page "We've got over 6,000
> pages already. We want to make over 100,000." The Wayback machine then
> skips ahead 5 more months, by which point Wikipedia brags "We started in
> January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make over
> 100,000, so let's get to work"
>
> To be sure, Knol has a lot of very serious problems with it. But it's only
> 6 months old. The concept is far from finalized. 6 months into Jimmy
> Wales' encyclopedia dream he was still working on Nupedia.
>
> Here's the Wikipedia on George Bush 19 months into Wikipedia:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20020817062610/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/George_Bush
>
> How long will it take you to find a better article on Barack Obama in Knol?
With Wikipedia by this point, the basic concept of collaboration had
been proved. With Knol, we see only the divisiveness of the payments
system*, and a few isolated authors striving on their own.
More to the point: yes, we should expect more of Knol than of
Wikipedia at similar stages! Knol has, by virtue of its position in
time, *numerous* advantages over Nupedia/Wikipedia. We should expect a
lot more.
It has:
1) A clear license regime. Thanks to 8 years of Creative Commons, the
choice is not limited to just the GFDL (with its many problems).
2) 8 years of hardware advances, or approximately 5 iterations of Moore's law.
3) 8 years of wiki development, demonstrating dead ends, the good
ideas, & what remains to be improved. Imagine if Knol had to start
with the state of the art in 2001. It would be truly gruesome. (Anyone
looked at the very old Wikipedias in Nostalgia, or old usemod wikis
like Ward's? They're hideous and unusable! They make me quite grateful
for 2009 MediaWiki with all its modern conveniences.)
4) The backing of a commercial juggernaut. Quite aside from Knol's
hosting being a) very good; and b) not the Knol devs' concern,
Google's backing offers an array of advantages, from certainty to
excellent software development resources**, such as:
5) Massive publicity. To be facetious, at launch Knol had infinitely
more publicity than did Wikipedia.
6) A public educated to read wikis, and to use them. How many people
could Wikipedia hope to draw on at day 1 - that cared even a little
about Free content, that knew what a wiki was, that wouldn't dismiss
it as hopeless, and had an editing familiarity with wikis? Darned few.
We had to constantly evangelize and educate people about wikis, and by
dint of unremitting effort create the English Wikipedia and make it
interesting and valuable enough that people would contribute who
didn't fulfill any of those criteria. En was the existence proof that
large-scale wikis were possible and valuable. Knol, on the other hand,
can draw immediately on that pool of people Wikipedia created.
7) A model targeted directly at people unhappy with Wikipedia. Are you
an expert tired of 'anti-expertism' on Wikipedia? Why try to get along
with those bumpkins when you could have your own article completely to
yourself on Google Knol (and get paid for't)? Wikipedia appealed to
those unhappy with Nupedia. Nupedia when Wikipedia launched was a lot
smaller than Wikipedia was when Knol launched. I think this pool of
possible contributors was thus also much larger for Knol than it was
for Wikipedia.
etc. etc.
* If I weren't so lazy, this is where I'd cite some of the studies
showing paying some contributors to FLOSS projects reduces
volunteerism.
** Not to denigrate the efforts of Magnus and Tim and all the other
MediaWiki developers over the years, but one simply expects more of
full-time developers experienced with the famous Google infrastructure
and supposedly at Google's standards of excellence.
- --
gwern
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The other day I noticed an editor replacing multiple references to a website
that has disappeared with {{fact}}, in different articles.
The other day I noticed an editor removing a number of references to a
website, with a "this site is gone" edit summary. The site has indeed left
the building, so to speak, but I'm not sure what the rule is here.
Question for the panel: is it better to just leave the links as is (with a
note that the site does not exist anymore), remove them altogether, or
replace the links with archive.org links?
In these particular instances the links were replaced by {{fact}}, which
is--to my mind--the worst of all options: it makes it look as if there never
were proper sources for the statement, or actually worse: the "citation
needed" make it look as if the statements are somehow controversial. Not to
mention that they now run the risk of being deleted.
(The issue that made me think about this is clouded by the fact that the
editor effectively removing the sources deems the originally referenced site
untrustworthy, but that's beside the larger point, really.)
Michel Vuijlsteke
On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 19:23 +0000, wikien-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
wrote:
> From: Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>
> multiple references to a website
> that has disappeared
> Question for the panel: is it better to just leave the links as is
> (with a
> note that the site does not exist anymore), remove them altogether, or
> replace the links with archive.org links?
I, for one, would say that yoy should just do what you would do with
offline sources, there is no reason to treat online sources in a
different way: when you cite a journal it is the reader's responsibility
to go and find it in a library, not yours, as long as you give all
necessary information to locate a copy of the journal if one exists at
all, and if the journal goes out of print and all libraries of the world
somehow decide to burn all copies of that journal then it is still not
your responsibility, as an author or editor.
A dead link is like a book which is out of print. It is hard to find,
but it was published someday, so it is appropriate to cite it as long as
you include the access date (a short quotation would help too).
Your responsibility as an author is to provide proper references that
would enable one to spot the source if copies exist and to provide the
information in a correct manner (eg if the source says "a bit of it"
don't write "lots of it"). For links, as long as you cite the pages for
information that is correct and truthful and you provide proper
citations (URL, access date, etc) then you have done what is expected of
you. Noting that a link is dead or providing a link to a web archiver
is a good thing, too.
There are some systems where you can go and keep a snapshot of a webpage
for future reference. Using them is a good thing, but not necessary:
when you reference a book you don't make a snapshot of it, so you
shouldn't be required to take snapshots of webpages just because
webpages may go dead (books can be burned or become out of print, too).
However, do note that placing citations to dead webpages, or to live
webpages that soon afterwards go dead, is a way to commit undetectable
vandalism. There is no easy solution against this, unless one is
willing to not include any dead links.
Furthermore, the responsibilities of the author have to be balanced with
the rights of the reader: the reader has a right to be able to check
your work for accuracy, and citations are supposed to satisfy that
right, but with the web this system appears to be broken now (with books
and journals it was very unlikely for a paper source to disappear from
all over the world and from all libraries at once), so one could say
that dead links do not appear to be very useful for readers,
particularly those not familiar with citation systems. While the author
has a responsibility to provide sources and assist one in finding them
by providing proper publication and access dates or other information,
they are not responsible for actually keeping a copy of them or of
actually finding them themselves after an article is written, but the
reader has a right to be able to check the author's accuracy and
therefore the volatility of the web appears to be a diservice to
readers.
Perhaps the best solution would be to build a web archiving platform in
Wikipedia itself, so that all referenced webpages are stored for later
retrieval.
--
Thanks,
NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis, http://nsk.karastathis.org/
G'day folks,
>From the Sydney Morning Herald:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/battle-to-outgun-wikipedia-an…
"In a move to take on Wikipedia, the *Encyclopedia Britannica* is inviting
the hoi polloi to edit, enhance and contribute to its online version.
New features enabling the inclusion of this user-generated content will be
rolled out on the encyclopedia's website over the next 24 hours, *
Britannica's* president, Jorge Cauz, said in an interview today." (More in
story)
Regards
Keith Old