[Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[David Richfield]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 1:55 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/11/3 David Richfield <davidrichfield at gmail.com>:
>> 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.
>
> Problem is a lot of books are rather questionable. However dead tree
> worship means people generally ask fewer questions.

People should question book sources, but that doesn't mean that we
shouldn't be encouraging people to find them and use them.

> The reality is
> that your average person is unlikely to access to journals and only
> have books to hand on a narrow range of subjects.

If you have the web to hand, you have Google Books and Google Scholar
(which shows you which of the articles are full-text).

> Under those
> conditions the web is by far the most likely viable source of
> citations.

A much richer source of citations, true, and easy to use badly, but
very hard to use well: it's easy to get rubbish sources off the web,
but it takes experience and expertise to find good ones.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(ði)+1=0