I think the modified proposal is really nifty. Yes, that's quite the sort of thing I had in mind. And pinpointing the idea of an "educational resource" is valuable in helping me describe exactly how I'm thinking of this project.
To respond to some other people re: spamming. People can already do that, but they don't, really. I'm going to take the optimistic view and say this: that I intend only to add sources that I have read or am at least familiar with, and to accompany the less obvious listings with a short description. If someone posts a long list of sources with no explanation, other editors can sift through them, adding commentary, and removing the ones that seem truly spurious. This is how the rest of WP works, I don't see that this will be much different.
-F
On Apr 2, 2006, at 2:43 PM, Cormac Lawler wrote:
Hi Finlay,
I think there's real merit to this idea, and, though I understand the previously mentioned problems of blindly adding books for the sake of it or adding books for commercial interest, this needn't deter people from building (and then accessing) a comprehensive bibliography on a given subject.
I agree this could be done better in Wikipedia in general (though there are obvious good examples where this *is* done well). But I'm thinking this could fit quite well with Wikiversity (another proposed project), which will (amongst other things) assemble a network of references for further reading on a topic. You can see details for this project at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Modified_project_proposal - though there is much more information on this (something I'm working on at the moment).
What do you think?
Cormac