I'd rather not spend much more time discussing this. Our differences in opinion are somewhat academic anyhow. In practice we all agree that Wikipedia's articles need more and better references.
But I personally think that trying to make every fact "checkable" through references at the bottom of the article is a chimera. In practice people don't fact-check articles by getting the books at the bottom and reading them through. People fact-check articles by seeing something that they think is wrong and then looking up the correct fact in a work of their choosing. That's our actual model of arriving at the truth and it works well most of the time.
A fact on a bird species I supply through an Icelandic ornithology book is only very marginally "more checkable" to 99.9% of Wikipedia's editors if I supply the name of the book. You're better off looking the relevant bird up in a book of your choosing.
To make the example more concrete here's the edit I'm thinking off. I was editing out of town (watching birds) a month ago and hadn't logged in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arctic_Tern&diff=16117224&...
As you can see I *did* supply the source in the edit history though I didn't find it worthy of the article itself. Interestingly no other editor has supplied any source at all.
Regards, Haukur
Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
Clearly you should list each of the 4-5 online obituaries as sources.
I'd like to take this opportunity to disagree slightly with what I see as a fundamentalist view, namely that an article should always list as references exactly the sources that the editor had in front of herself while contributing to it.
It is the proper thing to do to cite these as references.
I think that it's often more helpful for the reader to list other works. For example I often use my Icelandic books to find information, for example about bird species. But it's just not very useful for the typical reader of English Wikipedia to see those sources. Who is going to check them or use them?
The choice of what to mention as a reference should not presume what the reader will or will not understand or what may or may not be easily avaiable to him. That is the beginning of dumbing down. If you used an Icelandic book that's fine; say so. Making things checkable does not imply easily chackable.
I thing that the idea to make everything on Wikipedia "checkable" through references is a chimera. To begin with - when was the last time you fact-checked an article through the references at i
Additional English references can also be mentioned.
Don't get me wrong, I often put Icelandic sources under the References heading - but I prefer to do it only for subjects where there aren't any English books with the same information. For subjects like bird species where there are plenty of good works in English (which I don't have) citing Icelandic sources is jarring and not appropriate (except, perhaps, for something like [[Fauna of Iceland]]).
If the English works have the "same" information, you must have used them to know that. :-)
As for a bio-article boiled out of 4-5 online obituaries I don't think listing those as references will be terribly useful. Typically half of them will be inaccessible after a couple of months. It doesn't hurt to mention them, though, perhaps on the talk page if you feel they won't be useful to the reader on the article page.
Having things unavailable after a couple of months is typical of life on the internet. That's why it's good to add hard copy references.
And the separation into References and Further reading is also somewhat artificial and not always appropriate. If these sections on [[Bobby Fischer]] (currently on FAC) are to be believed we're using a couple of online articles and a book called "Secrets Of Modern Chess Strategy" as References - whereas Fischer's actual biographies are listed as Further reading.
I agree that there is not much point to having the two separate sections. The semantic difference between "references" and "further reading" is not that great.
If the role of an encyclopedia is to be the starting point for further research. We should endeavour to list the *best works* in the bibliographies, not just whatever we happened to have in front of us while writing.
"Best works" is a matter of judgement. If you don't have access to them, how can you even judge if they are the best? If yoi write a whole new article what you have in front of you is the best reference you can provide.
Ec
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