On 7/4/12 1:04 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
What would a Wikipedia look like that did not make use
of press sources? It
would look a hell of a lot more like an encyclopedia. Thousands of silly
arguments would never arise. Thousands of apposite criticisms of Wikipedia
would never arise. These are good things.
Unfortunately, such a Wikipedia would also have vastly impoverished
coverage of popular culture and current affairs. The articles on Lady Gaga
and Barack Obama would be years behind events; the articles on the Japan
earthquakes, which I believe Wikipedia was widely praised for, would only
now begin to be written, articles on many towns and villages would lack
colour and detail.
It's an intriguing idea, and I agree with the general principle of
reducing reliance on sources with less gestation time, of which
newspapers are the biggest offender. I do tend to apply it in an
as-alternatives-are-available fashion, and to many kinds of sources. For
example, citing a recent academic conference paper may be justified if
no synthesizing source is available, but there are dangers to cobbling
together a new synthesis out of a dozen conference papers that may or
may not be representative of majority views in a field, that may now be
obsolete in ways unbeknownst to the reader, etc. Better to cite a proper
book or survey article, if one is available.
A problem with avoiding newspapers entirely, added to those you mention,
is that we'd even lose many things that aren't that recent. Especially
in their more "summary" pieces such as obituaries and biopics,
newspapers (and newsmagazines) fill in a lot of fairly uncontroversial
information on more minor, but potentially still important, people and
events. For the ancient world, that information is compiled fairly
exhaustively in academic sources; you can find at least a three-sentence
biography of every attested figure in some kind of specialist
encyclopedia, e.g. the impressively comprehensive _Prosopography of the
Later Roman Empire_. But for 20th-century figures that's often not the
case. For example, I've written a number of articles on minor political
figures (a mayor of Houston, say) primarily sourced from obituaries in
major newspapers, e.g. the NYT's obituary section. For what they are,
they are usually reliable enough: they provide some dates, a summary of
offices held, and a brief mention of why the person is known. For famous
figures, there are usually better sources, but for minor figures the
alternatives are often more like primary sources, e.g. the state or
municipal archives, or not including an article at all.
-Mark