Neil Harris wrote:
At the moment, some articles have disclaimer notices added (in addition to the general disclaimer covering the whole encyclopedia, of course). The new MediaWiki namespace has recently improved things by allowing the text of article disclaimer notices to be standardised and updates automated.
I think these disclaimers are very ugly and make us look unprofessional (most reference works don't start their articles with disclaimers!). I also think they are a bad idea since their absence implies that somebody should be able to trust the content. It is also self-referential and has links to a Wikipedia-namespace page. Having too many of these links adds an extra burden on third party users of our content who would want to remove the Wikipedia-specific references.
It is ''far'' better IMO just to have a link to [[Wikipedia:Disclaimers]] at the bottom of every page. In fact I think I'll go ahead and do that this weekend.
That would get rid of the need to place these ugly notices everywhere.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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From: Daniel Mayer on Tuesday, December 23, 2003 1:19 PM
It is ''far'' better IMO just to have a link to [[Wikipedia:Disclaimers]] at the bottom of every page. In fact I think I'll go ahead and do that this weekend.
That would get rid of the need to place these ugly notices everywhere.
I agree. Information is dangerous and knowledge more so, but it's pretty much what you get with an encyclopedia.
Maybe we should just put this disclaimer on the top of every page:
"When we say The Free Encyclopedia we really mean it."
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