In a message dated 8/11/2008 3:54:52 PM Pacific Daylight Time, thomas.dalton@gmail.com writes:
Sure they do. You just have to go down to the local library. For the most part, we're talking about academics/students so they can just go to the Uni library which will have plenty of old newspapers.>>
------------- I would submit that the majority of Wikipedians are not academics except amateur ones. And you will recall the story cited here stated that the library in-question had "8,000 volumes".
I myself went to Northwestern University, which I believe claimed something like 100,000 volumes. That's quite different. We do have editors in-Wiki who cite underlying source without citing the overlying source. I've personally encountered it several times. Usually the way it's found is where the extract is so apparently biased that the suspicion is raised that it's out-of-context. So after digging into the source, the original editor may admit that they cut the quote off a web site and didn't really read the underlying source directly.
You get this quite a bit with things like details about various presidents and what they supposedly said.
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2008/8/12 WJhonson@aol.com:
In a message dated 8/11/2008 3:54:52 PM Pacific Daylight Time, thomas.dalton@gmail.com writes:
Sure they do. You just have to go down to the local library. For the most part, we're talking about academics/students so they can just go to the Uni library which will have plenty of old newspapers.>>
I would submit that the majority of Wikipedians are not academics except amateur ones.
We're not talking about Wikipedians, we're talking about academics citing Wikipedia.
And you will recall the story cited here stated that the library in-question had "8,000 volumes".
That's a particularly unusual case of academic work being done on a boat. In such circumstances, it may well be reasonable to just trust Wikipedia to have things right, but you still need to cite it.
I myself went to Northwestern University, which I believe claimed something like 100,000 volumes. That's quite different. We do have editors in-Wiki who cite underlying source without citing the overlying source. I've personally encountered it several times. Usually the way it's found is where the extract is so apparently biased that the suspicion is raised that it's out-of-context. So after digging into the source, the original editor may admit that they cut the quote off a web site and didn't really read the underlying source directly.
You get this quite a bit with things like details about various presidents and what they supposedly said.
I don't doubt that it happens. It's completely unacceptable and is why people should not cite Wikipedia is serious research.