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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