[Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/02/11 11:27 PM, David Richfield wrote:
> A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich
> source of bad references.  We should rather be looking at ways to get
> references to books and journal articles.  Web references should be
> the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of
> websites are not WP:RS.
>
> How about a wizard-like tool which asks "did you read this in a book,
> in a newspaper, a journal article or on the web?" and if the answer is
> "on the web" asks the user how they know it's true.  Compare for
> example Commons's image uploader.  Users who care about references
> should be taught how to extract good refs from Google Books and Google
> Scholar - both quite easy to use.  If you paste the ISBN of a book
> into Citation Expander, it fills in the whole citation for you, and
> the same for pubmed IDs.  Now we just need a tool which will do this
> for major newspapers on the web.
>
This demands far too much of newbies.  We can sometimes be very 
cult-like in our demand for references and sources. If you want to scare 
away newbies you do that very well by thrusting him into a highly 
subjective debate about the nature of reliable sources.  I too would 
prefer books and articles. I'm also sure that some of the references 
provided will be bad.  A reference is what it is, but it would be 
badgering newbies to ask them how they know that something is true. What 
we want to instill here is the good habit of references, and out of good 
faith trust that editors are not inventing their references. *Keep it 
simple.*

A tool that ask whether the reference is from a book, a journal, the web 
or something else is good for a different reason. The choice would lead 
to different drop-down boxes where only the relevant questions would be 
asked. A lot of the books that I have are pre-ISBN.

Ray