[WikiEN-l] Re: Plagiarism Policy, was A Missing Policy

[Haukur Þorgeirsson]

> Clearly you should list each of the 4-5 online obituaries as sources.

I'd like to take this opportunity to disagree
slightly with what I see as a fundamentalist view,
namely that an article should always list as
references exactly the sources that the editor
had in front of herself while contributing to it.

I think that it's often more helpful for the reader
to list other works. For example I often use my
Icelandic books to find information, for example
about bird species. But it's just not very useful for
the typical reader of English Wikipedia to see those
sources. Who is going to check them or use them?

Don't get me wrong, I often put Icelandic sources
under the References heading - but I prefer to do
it only for subjects where there aren't any English
books with the same information. For subjects like
bird species where there are plenty of good works
in English (which I don't have) citing Icelandic
sources is jarring and not appropriate (except,
perhaps, for something like [[Fauna of Iceland]]).

As for a bio-article boiled out of 4-5 online
obituaries I don't think listing those as references
will be terribly useful. Typically half of them
will be inaccessible after a couple of months.
It doesn't hurt to mention them, though, perhaps
on the talk page if you feel they won't be useful
to the reader on the article page.

And the separation into References and Further reading
is also somewhat artificial and not always appropriate.
If these sections on [[Bobby Fischer]] (currently on FAC)
are to be believed we're using a couple of online articles
and a book called "Secrets Of Modern Chess Strategy" as
References - whereas Fischer's actual biographies are
listed as Further reading.

If the role of an encyclopedia is to be the starting
point for further research. We should endeavour to list
the *best works* in the bibliographies, not just whatever
we happened to have in front of us while writing.

Regards,
Haukur