On 8/10/07, Majorly axel9891@googlemail.com wrote:
On 10/08/07, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Sourcing and reliable sourcing seems to be the topic of the day, so it
is
worth taking a look at some examples of "sourcing" to see how practical they are. In the English Wikipedia, at least, there seems to be a culture of adding {{fact}} templates to articles, and while these are often valid, at
other
times, the source can be found in the very next sentence. In many instances, a source can be found simply by going to Google or Google Books, so that I wonder whether the person putting in the {{fact}} tags actually bothered to
check
if any information was readily available.
This is how it works, obviously it needs to be more clearer and the fact tag will help make the article better. People must think that there are certain "wikignomes" who go through the uncited category and find fact for things like this and that it'll get done faster that way.
More disconcerting, however, is the idea of sourcing with Wikipedia articles. This morning I went through the article on [[Italy]]. In the reference section, there are six citations of other Wikipedia articles, which is interesting because the facts there are unsourced too. See footnotes
14-17
and 23, 24 for examples. Note that I am not saying the information is wrong--simply that it would be nice to see it validated and confirmed, and if it is validated, to see it validated properly.
Well, this isn't really allowed and is discouraged. We're not supposed to source Wikipedia articles with other Wikipedia article.s
Danny
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People will add tags often before even trying to verify the stuff themselves (which is the whole point of Wikipedia), and all it often takes is a quick Google search to find a relevant website/news article etc. Just as bad as citing Wikipedia though, is citing mirror sites. Ensure the text you cite simply isn't a copy of Wikipedia :P Check the date of the website and try to see which came first, to see if it really is original. And of course, it must be a reliable source, not someone's personal Geocities site :) Wikipedia, sadly is not reliable as we'd want it to be.
:-( but true.
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