At 06:17 PM 10/28/2006, Sam Korn wrote:
- We are getting more rigid about demanding sources/citations for new
material. This is necessary. I expect most academics who contribute, being used to being judged by their qualifications/reputation, will not cite and reference their work in the way Wikipedia demands.
Giving references is the one thing about writing an encyclopedia article that academics are used to.
Chris
Chris Lüer wrote:
At 06:17 PM 10/28/2006, Sam Korn wrote:
- We are getting more rigid about demanding sources/citations for new
material. This is necessary. I expect most academics who contribute, being used to being judged by their qualifications/reputation, will not cite and reference their work in the way Wikipedia demands.
Giving references is the one thing about writing an encyclopedia article that academics are used to.
That's true, but it depends somewhat on the context. When writing textbooks or tutorial material, often references are left out, and instead the correctness of the material relies on the authority of the writer. References creep in more and more as the material gets more and more like research---graduate-level advanced textbooks have more references than intro textbooks, and monographs reporting novel results have even more.
It may just require some gentle acclimation into the Wikipedia culture---academics may be perfectly capable of providing references at will, but simply not know that Wikipedia would prefer references even for intro-level material that's commonly known in the field.
-Mark
On 10/29/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote: [snip]
It may just require some gentle acclimation into the Wikipedia culture---academics may be perfectly capable of providing references at will, but simply not know that Wikipedia would prefer references even for intro-level material that's commonly known in the field.
It's sometimes hard to convince someone that we're not trying to be mean when we tell them they must cite sources because when the look around Wikipedia they find homogeneous swaths of it uncited or poorly cited.
We have parallel problems with copyright violations and other areas where the active community has thoroughly agreed that Wikipedia should do X while most of Wikipedia still does Y.
I don't know of any magic solution to this but I think it's useful to point it out so folks keep it in mind when they remind people to conform to standards which differ from the implementation of many articles.