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
On 6/19/07, Chris Lüer chris@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
On 6/19/07, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
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).
Here's a hypothetical for the developers or anyone else familiar with MediaWiki: Could a program be created that would automatically go through an article's history and find who added a particular statement to an article? If so, could a semi-automatic bot be programmed that would find out who added statements with Citation Needed tags and with approval from whoever is watching the bot make a message on their talk page asking if they could add a citation? Human control means it wont waste its time asking thousands of ip users for sources, only registered users. This would require we put up with Citation Needed tags being routinely slathered all over articles, but would ultimately lead to higher average article quality.
-Chris Croy