It's a nice idea, but who determines what's worth listing in such a further reading section and what will you do to stop people from spamming long lists of books into such sections?
You'd also need to find a way to teach people the difference between "further reading" and "references" or it might lose us a lot of references in the process because of people ignorant on the subject.
Mgm
On 3/31/06, flogan1@swarthmore.edu flogan1@swarthmore.edu wrote:
Hello list! I'm new to the list, so perhaps a short intro is in order. My name is Finlay and I am known to WP as Cantara. I've been a Wikipedian since sometime in 2004, but have only become really active in the last few months. I joined the list at the suggestion of CComMack, who thought that an idea I had (see below) might want input from people knowledgeably about policy and so forth.
My idea is this. We all know that Wikipedia is great and all, repository of the world's information, &c. However, there are people who disagree, who think that Wikipedia is inaccurate because it is written by people who are not experts and because it lacks oversight (or whatever it is they're saying now). When considering these two things together, I realized that there is a kind of information that Wikipedia seriously lacks, and that is bibliographies. If you've written a research paper lately (I'm writing two at the moment, myself) you know that the list of books that the author has read is just as valuable as whatever the book itself is about. However, Wikipedians don't really make an effort to include "further reading" as part of the entry, beyond what they list as citations.
I wanted to start a project to focus on getting that store of information into Wikipedia, and once I get around to it I'll list it on Proposed Projects. However, as mentioned about, a fellow editor suggested that a project like this might have repurcussions in other areas (and I hope he responds to explain what they were - something about the manual of style?).
Discuss, then, and if you'd like to help, I'll have information up somewhere on my userpage fairly soon.
Yours, Cantara _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l