On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Matt Brown wrote:
On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I did keep the list. I'll keep my reasons for not following your suggestion to myself, to avoid offending anyone. Presumably you would like me to email the list to you so you can carry out this work? If you're impatient, feel free to start hitting that "random article" button - you'll find lots more like I did.
I think you misunderstood Guettarda - he didn't mean improving the list of random articles you created, he meant that each of us should check all the articles we've created (or significantly rewritten, I'd add) and ensure that they are up to modern referencing standards.
Er, what is this "modern referencing standards" you are talking about? Is this some new thing that was voted on & made policy without much fanfare, or are you referring to some academic standard like the _MLA Handbook_? If it is the later, I can show you many examples of unsatisfactory referencing in modern publications, & excellent examples in older publications. If it is the former, I need to point out that in the last month I have encountered a wide variety of opinions from other Wikipedians on how this should be done to conclude that most believe that "proper referencing standards" is another way of saying "this is how I think it should be done".
(As for me, I like footnotes & use them when in doubt. But I won't footnote a statement if it is reasonably close to the section I have just footnoted, & try not to overuse them. And I wish the MLA hadn't deprecated the use of "ibid." & "op. cit.")
After all, if you created the article, you probably know where to look to reference it. Many of us created articles "back in the day" before strict referencing was being encouraged as strongly as it is now, and they could probably do with some work.
For the first couple of years I contributed to Wikipedia (up to about the time David Gerard came on board) I was more concerned with avoiding copyright infringements than proper research & reference practices. (For example, if pressed about some of the material I contributed to the Classical & Roman Empire topics, I doubt I could do much more than to point at some of the standard references like the Oxford Classical Dictionary or some other books on my shelves & say "I think it came from somewhere in there.") I know I'm not the only person who did this: I remember encountering the hundreds of mythology-related articles that Tuff-Kat added in those days, & wondering which PD encyclopedia he had copied the information out of. (Not to pick on Tuf-Kat; AFAICS, all of that material looked reliable. And I could mention other, less salubrious examples of material copied into Wikipedia from those days.)
Geoff