[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[Andreas Kolbe]

> > Geni, would you like to describe how you research
> sources?
> 
> Entirely depends on what I'm doing. Sometimes I start with
> an article
> and go looking for refs.


Okay. Assume that all I am saying is: when you go looking for refs, look first whether there are any academic refs out there that might be useful to you.


> Again we go back to that simply being impossible for
> something like
> [[canal]]. I know my way around UK canals well enough to
> know that
> Charles Hadfield's work is the bedrock of of british canal
> history.
> But worldwide? For example I know japan has canals but I
> can't read
> japanese and would have no idea where to start if I did.


Seems to me you would not be the right editor to embark on this then. :) Best to leave it to someone who speaks Japanese, and they should have a look what scholarly literature there is available, including Japanese scholarly literature.


> However by that point you are getting into featured article
> standard
> rather than regular editing.


Long-term, that is where Wikipedia wants to be. The idea is that all articles will get better over time, until they are of a professional standard that deserves FA status. Whether that happens in practice is partly what we are discussing here.

 
> But even at that level your argument doesn't hold. The main
> author of
> the [[Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal]] featured article
> didn't have a
> copy of Hadfield's The Canals of Northwest England (Volume
> 2). Thus
> collaboration.


Of course you collaborate -- one editor has one source, another has another source. But even the main editor presumably knew that Hadfield's book was important, and that the article would be incomplete without it. (In fact, looking at the first FAC, it seems the lead editor got hold of the book in the end to help the article pass.)


Peter Damian wrote:
1.  Is there a quality problem in certain areas.  Yes or no?

I do believe that the number of FAs and GAs that en:WP has in "Philosophy and psychology" is particularly low, especially when compared to areas like history, warfare and videogaming, or when compared to de:WP.

Other areas with low or low-ish numbers of FAs to date* are -

- Business, economics and finance
- Chemistry and mineralogy
- Computing
- Food and drink
- Health and medicine
- Language and linguistics
- Mathematics

A.


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fa