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.
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.
Danny
************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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.