On 1/19/07, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has to make do with what he can find. If all he can find is internet material it will shape and limit his perceptions. Fact checking should be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access to information.
I have been meaning to ask this. Has it ever been explored that the Foundation look at getting some subscriptions to archives and the like and allowing a reference team access to those subscriptions to do some fact checking?
This was talked about a few months ago, as well. Any reasonable collection would probably cost more money than we have; and then there's the question of what (and what subjects) to buy -- there's no one "right answer" for databases and archives for most subjects, especially given the relative obscurity of much of what is getting fact-checked around here. I don't think the general databases would be much help. If anyone has any particular ideas about specific products that would be very helpful, I'd be happy to do some price-checking for various models and report back. The usual institutional academic license (based on # of users) obviously wouldn't work for us so there would have to be some pretty heavy negotiation with pubishers.
However! There's more than a few Wikipedians with access to world-class university collections, and that *can* scale. There's these two projects currently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newspapers_and_magazines_request_serv... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_resources
(The latter needs to be revived and brought up to date). How to make these services more useful, so as to distribute research work?
There's three parts to it: - knowing where to look and having access to the appropriate resource - doing the actual searching for a topic - just picking up a known citation out of a digital archive or journal and sending it to someone.
None of these things take exactly the same skill set; the first is traditionally the work of librarians, while anyone with access can do the last. Searching falls somewhere in the middle. I would love to see some kind of a 'fact-check' network set up to take advantage of what all we might have access to.
-- phoebe
p.s.: in re: your SciAm issues, Ray, it looks like it's been fully digitized from 1845-1908, and then from 1993-present, but not the stuff in the middle yet. Access to digitization (and subsequent drop in use for the printed copies) is probably why the print issues got dumped; that and lack of space for something that has a lot of duplicates around the country and can thus be ILL'ed if anyone desperately needs the paper.