http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot
Close to 1000 modifications and 54 footnotes, in less than 24 hours.
Nice work, Wikipedia.
Steve
On 10/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot Close to 1000 modifications and 54 footnotes, in less than 24 hours. Nice work, Wikipedia.
One of the raids happened just down the street from me, and I got a photo of police outside with tape around the house half an hour ago. I'll just go upload it and add it to the article ... there's probably a Wikinews article that could do with it as well.
- d.
Hi,
Quoting Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot Close to 1000 modifications and 54 footnotes, in less than 24 hours.
To what extent are we duplicating effort or competing with Wikinews here? Are we doing something substantially different?
Jkelly
On 8/10/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
To what extent are we duplicating effort or competing with Wikinews here? Are we doing something substantially different?
We're citing everything to external sources, for one. The WikiNews policy of allowing "original reporting" basically makes their articles unsuitable for direct copying to Wikipedia, which means that we have to write our own if we think the topic deserves an encyclopedia entry rather than merely a news report.
On 10/08/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/10/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
To what extent are we duplicating effort or competing with Wikinews here? Are we doing something substantially different?
We're citing everything to external sources, for one. The WikiNews policy of allowing "original reporting" basically makes their articles unsuitable for direct copying to Wikipedia, which means that we have to write our own if we think the topic deserves an encyclopedia entry rather than merely a news report.
Yep. I've just added my photo to the Wikipedia and Wikinews articles (original photojournalism! and then there were the other five photojournalists on the corner as well) and I'm about to write up what I saw this morning. And [[User:Arkady Rose]] got some shots of the helicopters overhead around the time of the actual raid, and I'll add those and note down what she saw as well for the Wikinews article. But only the photos would be suitable for Wikipedia.
- d.
On 10/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot
Close to 1000 modifications and 54 footnotes, in less than 24 hours.
Nice work, Wikipedia.
I rode herd on it for a few hours this morning - it's remarkable how much can be achieved just by insisting on sources. Most of those 54 footnotes could be cleaned up and merged together, though - there's no reason to cite a dozen news stories saying the same thing...
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
I rode herd on it for a few hours this morning - it's remarkable how much can be achieved just by insisting on sources. Most of those 54
Yeah, I noticed that the comment that you had to taste your own breast milk if you wanted to take it on board was repeated twice, and sourced to two different sources, and neither of them actually said that! Verifiability is nice sometimes...
footnotes could be cleaned up and merged together, though - there's no reason to cite a dozen news stories saying the same thing...
Yes and no. If they're all AAP or Reuters-derived, then no. Other times I like to provide links to *every single* source, if there aren't ridiculously many of them.
Steve
On 8/10/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
footnotes could be cleaned up and merged together, though - there's no reason to cite a dozen news stories saying the same thing...
Yes and no. If they're all AAP or Reuters-derived, then no. Other times I like to provide links to *every single* source, if there aren't ridiculously many of them.
Agreed - while wholly redundant stories from a single ultimate source are unnecessary, quoting more than one news source shows that the facts and opinions shown are not the solitary view of one news source ...
-Matt
Well, that's what you get with Breaking News current events, such as the Tsunami, or possibly 9/11.
On 10/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
footnotes could be cleaned up and merged together, though - there's no reason to cite a dozen news stories saying the same thing...
Yes and no. If they're all AAP or Reuters-derived, then no. Other times I like to provide links to *every single* source, if there aren't ridiculously many of them.
The problem is... well, every general news story about this lists, say, six citable facts (number of arrests, hypothesis of number of planes, Reid quote, flight cancellations, type of explosive) out of a dozen things that we need to cite; it's just they don't all say the same six. And when someone says "we need a cite for "up to ten aircraft", that gets cited from the news story you're reading, which might not be one of the news stories already used as a source which says that.
I think at one point we had two seperate sources for the same quote, two others for a single figure, because it got listed in two parts of the article. That sort of thing.
One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but there's no need to cite eight instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and rationalise some of the sources.
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but there's no need to cite eight instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and rationalise some of the sources.
If you're talking about citing some particular factoid, then yeah, citing more than 2 sources would be unusual. For an example of a situation where I did it, see [[Kate McTell]] - there's a bit where I list like 3 sources that say Ruby Glaze was a pseudonym, and 3 that say they were separate people. Similarly if you have something really controversial, then there are times that 10 footnotes for one sentence might be appropriate...
(but in general, 1's good! :))
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but there's no need to cite eight instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and rationalise some of the sources.
If you're talking about citing some particular factoid, then yeah, citing more than 2 sources would be unusual. For an example of a situation where I did it, see [[Kate McTell]] - there's a bit where I list like 3 sources that say Ruby Glaze was a pseudonym, and 3 that say they were separate people. Similarly if you have something really controversial, then there are times that 10 footnotes for one sentence might be appropriate...
(but in general, 1's good! :))
Not necessarily. A lot of innocent distortion can happen through the sloppy use of language. Several newspapers, all relying on the same and only source from a wireservice, can end up with amazingly different articles.
Recently a local newspaper, after running a survey in a high school came up with the headline, "50% of students smoke because it's cool." My first reaction was that I didn't think that the overall smoking rate was that high. When I read the whole article I found that indeed the overall rate of smoking was only 25%, and that the reference in the headline was to only half of that.
Your story about the McTell article points not only to the need to cite sources, but to the need to trace those sources. That's an even more difficult process. If the distortion is frequently cited in our sources we then need to document this error to avoid its being perpetuated.
Ec