This opens the question of how Citizendium would have done had it followed the initial plan of mirroring Wikipedia for articles that had not been rewritten by Citizendium people., and thus provided the very broad range from the first -- along with the hopefully improved quality of an increasing number of articles. Larry rejected this , and perhaps it was one of the idiosyncratic decisions of his that impaired the project.
I think it would still be possible to do this, but I wonder if it would help.
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 4:27 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 27/09/2010 04:13, Carcharoth wrote:
<snip>
There is plenty of obscure stuff that you still have to look up behind paywalls, or look for specialised publications (books and journals and monographs). I find myself coming across stuff like that all the time, but it is true that Wikipedia is often a convenient *starting* point for digging deeper. But if I don't find what I want on Wikipedia, I keep looking.
Indeed. "Comprehensive" is important, but "inclusive of starting points for research" rather more so. Think of the difference between "stub" and "FA" in those terms and you're getting somewhere. I think CZ missed a trick by not getting the whole gamut.
Of the free (i.e. non-paywall) sources available, the best for my purposes is often the book scans found at archive.org and on Google Books. In theory, as anyone can access those, they will eventually be used to source Wikipedia articles, but for obscure subjects that will take a very long time.
That seems not to be quite right. The recent gadget to locate our sources of links found Google Books at the top of the heap. My own researches show that Google Books is quite intensively used for referencing, for just such "obscure subjects". I do have my own axe to grind here (basically archive.org material being sent to Wikisource for much better presentation); but that is what takes time. Traditional chaos still reigns, but our purposes tend to make sense of what is out there.
Charles
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l