On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
interesting quick article about the trials and tribulations of other open access encyclopedia projects: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/14/encyclopedias
In another direction, I'm interested in the issues we have in citing online reference works.
(a) We do want permalinks if possible and don't want link rot. It seems that such works generally do not provide permalinks.
(b) There is the general {{cite web}} template, but it is cumbersome. There is an "access date" field but that can only be a compromise solution, if there is no permalink.
(c) For older works that are now in the public domain, the "correct" solution is to place the material in Wikisource, support it with proof reading and bibliographic details (including author information) over there, and link to it via interwiki rather than URL. That is, Wikisource should be the repository used by default for older material such as Britannica 1911. We are, though, a long way from even linking to existing articles there in preference to external links.
(d) Generally, instead of {{cite web}}, each commonly-used external reference cited should have a dedicated template for linking. Unlike some other areas, the drive for common standards seems not to have taken off here.
Bumping this because it's been sitting unread in my inbox for ages, and I think there are interesting things said here that should be discussed. Er, how about: how much do people here use wikisource. I think it is a great resource that gets under-used. Or pick up one of the point Charles made above, for example, how to motivate and start a drive for standards in citing common external references (I'm not sure if Charles means templates to wikisource, templates to other online stuff, or templates producing a formatted reference to a book).
Carcharoth