I just discovered the [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a press source]] article
the other day. It did strike me, however, that several of the articles
that were referenced by less prestigious publications did not have any
external references. One example is the latest one that referenced Poker
-
http://www.azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/1001poker01.html. This
article had little in the way of references (I've since gone through the
history with a fine tooth comb and found a few from the original
article), but I'm still unsure where the information about the history
of Poker came from!
I don't mean to make this specific to the Poker article. What I'm
suggesting is that if the press references one of our articles on the
press source page that we can absolutely make sure that our references
are up to scratch and our facts correct. Otherwise we're going to burn a
lot of news writers (who should have known better and done their /own/
research - but this is besides the point), and make us look bad.
I know it's a fair amount of work, but I'm basically putting this out
for comment on the mailing list.
One last thing: when it comes to referencing, it's great to have a
References section - but unless we have proper footnotes that quote the
page number of a publication we got the material from this makes it
*extremely* difficult for fact checkers to actually verify the
information in the story. Which helps give rise to factual inaccuracies
and POV.
Cheers,
Ta bu shi da yu