This involves both further reading, popular books and scholarly articles, and links to the best websites. These parts of an article are just as important as the basic summary of knowledge in the article itself. So to a certain extent we do want to be a web directory. Perhaps [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]] ought to be revised a bit to reflect this goal.
Fred
On May 25, 2005, at 12:51 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, Jimbo spoke about his impression that people want to know the qualifications of authors. This has been discussed to deatch so I will not comment. :)
Listening to the show I heard something else, it was put forward that people take wikipedia as the "gospel truth" either because they do not have more time or because they still do not have the skills to do some proper research. Jimbo dit put it very well on the show that the intention of an encyclopedia is to cover the basics of a subject. Having thought about it for a day, I came up with this conclusion: we emphasise on providing the sources for the articles written. This is cool for as far as it goes. However the emphasis should be on where the reader should go next. It is much more productive to state what and where good further reading can be found. The point is that the source for a fact does not necessarily make good reading even though it proves a factoid. It is much more productive to show where to go next.
The crux is that the mentioning of sources make a Wikipedia article credible. It does not point where to go for further research or information. To me this is distinctly different and it is much more important that we encourage people to learn more.
Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l