On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:

I decided I hadn't reviewed a featured article candidate for a while and Russell T Davies (writer of the Doctor Who reboot) was there. Figured I'd give it a go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_T_Davies

I invite you to look, with reasonable care, at references 1 to 97.

Now, not only are they from the same source but it would appear the page numbers are almost all accounted for (although I don't know how long the book is, but I'm willing to guess it's c.219 pages long). And the pages are ref'd in pretty much book order.

In short, were I Aldridge & Murray I think I would be feeling pretty hard done by at this point.

I should say, I don't have the book and that would be key before making a point too vehemently. Nevertheless, I wonder if we have a policy/guideline on appropriate levels of source mining?

I have another interest in this. I recently purchased a book on WWI. The centenary is coming up in 2014 and there is a desire to get our WWI articles in good shape before then. I intend to use the book extensively but I am anxious about what is acceptable.

Overuse of a source is possible, as is excessive use of a single source to the extent that you are effectively using the entirety of the source to build the article. Both are bad practices. Unfortunately, it is not something that gets picked up on or called out on often, but it should be. My personal standard is to think "would the authors of this book be justified in thinking that this article is making people less likely to read their book?" If so, then that line has been crossed.

About the World War I book. You will need more than one book. I have about 50 books on various topics to do with World War I. One of them is 'The Great War in History' (Winter and Prost, Cambridge University Press, 2005 - original edition in 2004 in French). Another is 'Who's Who in World War I' (Bourne, 2001). The latter in its 'guide to further reading' says simply "The literature of the Great War is immense." (followed by a long list over 2.5 pages). The former goes into more details:

"It would take several working lives just to read the existing literature on the Great War: more than 50,000 titles are listed in the library of the Bibliotheque de documentation internationale contemporaine in Paris."

Their book ends with a "Bibliography 1914-2003" where they list over 500 titles covered in their survey, and they don't even claim to include all the important works saying that would be "beyond them", and saying that the list is a "simple sketch of the avalanche of publications on the Great War", with new books appearing almost literally every day.

Of course, among these works are ones summarising the topic. Winter and Prost mention both the German and French encyclopedias: 'Enzyklopadie Erster Weltkreig' (2002) and 'Encyclopedie de la grande guerre. 1914-1918. Histoire et culture.' (2004). Along with plenty of English-language sources as well.

So you have to pick the right level and get a source that suits the article you are working on. For an article on a major battle, you would need several books on that battle. For an article on a major general, you would need several biographies of that general. And so on. For the general overview article on World War I itself, you would almost certainly need to base the overall structure on some survey of existing articles of similar length and what they cover. The problem being that there are several equally valid ways to write an article of several thousand words as an overview of World War I.

Ultimately, such top-level articles don't need to be perfect. As long as they are reasonably good and reasonably accurate, it is the subsidiary articles with the details that are more important, and Wikipedia is better at producing those sort of articles anyway.

Carcharoth