On 6/19/07, Chris Lüer <chris(a)zandria.net> wrote:
At 03:34 PM 6/19/2007, phoebe ayers wrote:
Hmm. Sounds like a Wikimania workshop to me,
and/or a series of workshops
online. Perhaps a wider support network being built between those with
access to resources and those without, or some research done into what
editors really *need* to source comprehensively (access? training?
motivation through policy or culture? all of this?) ... The problem is a
big
one, with differences and subtleties depending on
the article topic and
the
language of research, and our sourcing troubles
won't be easily solved by
either a "let's delete it all tomorrow" or a "let's let it all sit
around"
approach -- I think it's pretty clear that
neither entirely works.
Yes, I have been to workshops like this offered by libraries, and I
was underimpressed. Most of the advice simply did not apply to my
discipline. One of the most important parts of sourcing is figuring
out which sources are good (or, given two source, which is better?),
and that depends a lot on each area.
Chris
Yes -- and that's where you get into the type of knowledge that requires a
really deep knowledge of the field -- the sort of thing that traditionally
makes one an "expert". And this is also where the one-size-fits-all approach
of "we need references to something, anything, that's printed and backs this
statement up" in Wikipedia doesn't work out so well.
In practice, though, how information is created and distributed across many
academic disciplines is in fact similar. How helpful a generic workshop
would be probably depends a lot on how knowledgeable about research the
editor is coming in. In American high schools, for instance, they don't
usually teach useful library research: not of the caliber we'd ideally have
for Wikipedia, anyway. On the other hand, for the specialist, something
different might be required. IIRC, you're a computer scientist, Chris. In
real life, I am a librarian who specializes in computer science information.
We might be able to help each other. I wonder if other such partnerships
could be created fruitfully on the wiki -- a kind of
sharing-of-research-tasks that mirrors the near-automatic help that articles
get with copyediting and formatting now. To date, such work has been
coordinated through talk pages and clean-up templates, but that doesn't seem
to scale. The fact-check project is a noble endeavor, but hasn't really put
any innovative structures for coordination forward that I am aware of.
Something different is needed, that is less dependent on what any given
editor might happen to have at hand (and that manages to work within
copyright law and access restrictions -- perhaps a trickier problem).
-- phoebe