WikiEN-l May 2010

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72 participants
72 discussions

Wikipedia trumps Britannica
by Keith Old 04 May '10

04 May '10

Folks, According to John Graham-Cumming, Wikipedia is a better resource for researchers than Britannica. http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/wikipedia-trumps-britannia <http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/wikipedia-trumps-britannia>While writing The Geek Atlas I used both Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia for research. It quickly became obvious that Wikipedia trumps Britannica. ... While researching the history of places appearing in my book, The Geek Atlas<http://geekatlas.com/>, I used a lot of different resources. ... But the most useful resource was Wikipedia <http://wikipedia.org/>. At the start of writing the book I bought myself a subscription toEncyclopedia Britannica <http://www.britannica.com/> because I was worried that Wikipedia might be inaccurate. What I discovered was that Wikipedia trumps Britanncia all the time because its articles are in more depth and provide better references. And the site design means that Wikipedia is easily navigable and focuses on the content, whereas Britannica’s site assaults the eyes with distractions. Initially, I’d find myself double-checking facts on Wikipedia by looking in Britannica. I’d read that Boltzmann<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann> died on September 5, 1906 on Wikipedia and jump to Britannica to check the date<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/72401/Ludwig-Eduard-Boltzmann/724…> . After weeks of doing this I realized that Britannica wasn’t helping. Any errors I found on Wikipedia were because I was reading original source material (see for example this correction<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment&di…> ). And more often than not I was finding original source material via Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia has a policy<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability> of linking to reliable sources it turned out to be a wonderful starting point for research. Britannica, on the other hand, appears to view its role as being the reliable source. Because it is edited and managed, part of its brand is reliability. This leads to a sort of self-sufficiency which contrasts with Wikipedia’s need to prove its reliability constantly. The beauty of being forced to prove reliability is the wealth of third-party links provided by Wikipedia. For example, when reading about the Miller-Urey Experiment <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment> you’ll find a link to Miller’s 1953 paper<http://www.issol.org/miller/miller1953.pdf> describing the experiment. If you search for “Miller Urey Experiment” on Britannica the best you’ll find is a short (248 words) article about Stanley Miller that mentions the experiment. There are no links to external web sites concerning the experiment, and no references to material such as academic papers. So Wikipedia’s supposed ‘unreliability’ actually plays to enhance its reliability and usefulness because it’s forced to continuously declare where a particular fact was found. At the same time Britannica is a walled garden of truth. After a few weeks I canceled my Britannica subscription and worked solely with Wikipedia as a starting point for research. I never relied on Wikipedia as the sole source of information, but it was always a marvelous spring board to get me started. The richness of Wikipedia trumped the hallowed reliability of Britannica. -- Keith Old 62050121 (w) 62825360 (h) 0429478376 (m)

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IPA issues
by stevertigo 02 May '10

02 May '10

(Crossposted to wikien and foundation:) Some points about IPA on all language wikis. 1) As a rule, all language wikis should use International Phonetic Alphabet as their standard pronunciation scheme. Very few appear to actually do. 2) All language wikis should attempt to use IPA to pronounce the endonym of a foreign word, not the exonymic re-pronunciation (ie. Iraq = /iːˈrɑːk/ not /ɪˈræk/). 3) With rare exceptions, IPA should be the default phonemic transcription scheme, and alternate schemes such as [[Wikipedia:Pronunciation respelling key]] should be avoided or deprecated. 4) Feedback from languages about IPA should be useful. IPA is actually quite flexible about exactness, while still being phonetically precise. If there are flaws in IPA itself, the Wikipedia community can help raise them for the Internation Phonetic Association. 5) Ambiguity about how it is supposed to be used is a cross-project issue should be dealt with at the Foundation level (ie. global not just inter-wiki policy). -Stevertigo

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WikiEN-l May 2010