On Wednesday 02 November 2005 23:03, Walter van Kalken wrote:
It doesn't link enough??? IMHO opinion it links much to MUCH. Some artcles of maybe 1 A4 length contain over a 100 external links in the english wikipedia. Which is something I call madness. I certainly would not want to encourage people to go linking even more. On some subjects we have more links than the DMOZ project. And we are not google or DMOZ are we?
Hi Walter, in no way am I advocating something like a directory or going overboard lists of lists. My concern is wholly encyclopedic. If we're going to be concerned with questions of authority or trustworthiness, we then have to ask ourselves where does the authority for any claim in a Wikipedia article arise from? Expert reputation is not something we share with other knowledge production disciplines. And, possibly, in our favor we have thousands of eyeballs and fingers that those other disciplines do not have. Most of the debate in a larger media about the Wikipedia seem to be about these two issues. However, the one thing we do have in common with traditional disciplines is citation/linking.
Now, I have scholarly pretensions ;) and I'm very concerned with Wikipedia's history, so my experiences are likely to be different than yours. But in considering the Wikipedia timeline, I find the following undated (within a year) and unsourced entries:
[[ http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia * formation of w:NPOV consensus * Naming Conventions begins to normalize page names * "basic topic pages" spring up * Killing of subpages begins * Standard presentations for chemical elements & biological species * Manual of Style: efforts to standardize presentation across wikipedia ]]
For some of these, I don't know what they mean. For some, I can take a guess but I haven't found a source yet. And for others, such as manual of style, I think I know what they mean but can find a source that places the date nearly a year earlier. So, I am simply reiterating the following: [[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiability Fact checking is time consuming. It is unreasonable to expect other editors to dig for sources to check your work, particularly when the initial content is questionable. The burden of evidence lies with the editor who has made the edit. ]]