"David Goodman" dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote in message news:480eb3150610252215r984ab43tabbbc82247690382@mail.gmail.com...
On 10/25/06, Ray Saintonge
saintonge@telus.net wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
(Nor should old textbooks be cited on WP except for historical
interest).
This last bit is not realistic. While it is still preferable to cite the most recent edition, the fact is that people cite the edition that is available to them. We cannot require people to go out and buy the most recent edition before contributing. It's up to subsequent editors to update the information if they have something more recent.
We can expect our editors to use libraries. (And if you can't or don't want to work that way, there's an immense amount to write
on
WP. There's a great many topics--academic topics even--that can best be written with available Internet sources. )
Is your goal to produce a WP useful for 2006, or 1996? It would be very interesting to deliberately invent an encyclopedia appropriate for some specific earlier historical period, but many of the users may be more interested in the present.
It appears that you are refuting the viability of creating an encyclopedia iteratively, and that only complete, accurate, verified and peer-reviewed articles should be allowed on Wikipedia.
Surely information from 1996 is still valuable, in the absence of anything more up-to-date? Don't tell me that a textbook about Shakespeare will have changed so much in the last 10 years that its information is worthless!
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)