[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Tom Morris]

On Thursday, November 3, 2011, David Richfield <davidrichfield at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 1:55 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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).
>

That brings an idea to mind: would it be useful to have a way of trying to
encourage people to find useful prospective book and journal sources that
they don't necessarily have access to, and then having some uniform way of
flagging them for review. Lots of people in and around academia can
probably help here: librarians, Ph.D students etc. All that is needed is a
way of basically encouraging people to put up "sources we're not sure
about" on the talk page, and putting a flag on them (like enwp has for edit
protected and edit semi-protected).

Perhaps this could be part of the article feedback tool: "is this article
missing a source? could you tell us what it is?" - this would automatically
dump a new section on the talk page with whatever they type in, along with
a template called something like "potential ref" which would add a category
so someone could go and check up on it. And, yes, I do know that this may
seem like I'm coming up with a solution to the huge backlog of unreferenced
articles by creating a new backlog of "articles which need a reference
check". ;-)


-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>