On 7/19/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson haukurth@hi.is 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.
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?
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]]).
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.
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.
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.
Regards, Haukur
Hmmm... or is it just more that it might be embarrassing that the actual article sources are not that authoritative? (indeed perhaps just coming from a website!)
Wikipedia's detractors aren't making stuff up out of thin air, often merely drawing on, and exaggerating, the cases where we fail.
I would suggest that in many cases where sources are not cited, it's because they aren't good sources. And this happens all the time on less scrutinised Wikipedia articles.
Doesn't mean it's not plagiarism though to use someone else's work and not accredit it just because it's awkward for you to do so.
Zoney