[WikiEN-l] SOS -- Save Our Sources

[Steve Bennett]

On 12/4/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

> Things will change. At present we're hearing a lot about ex-copyright books being put online, but not seeing that. What I notice these days is how many older academic papers are now online, particularly in the humanities, but behind subscription walls. In a sense what WP should do is to harness its people to put selective quotes from those, undoubted fair use in the scholarly convention, online. Oh, that's what we do anyway ... seems we should assume good faith of those doing that. In summary, pro tem we should get round the issue with more verbatim footnotes.

Yeah, that's actually a solution available to us already that I had
sort of forgotten. Basically, instead of:

Jones expressed support for this.<ref>Some book, p190</ref>

We should ask people to do:

Jones expressed support for this.<ref>Some book, p190: "Although I
have reservations, I do agree that this initiative is
worthwhile."</ref>

or something. Personally, though, I'm not sure that references are
widely enough understood or respected at Wikipedia yet for me to
invest huge amounts of time in them - I have a (possibly unjustified)
fear that some editor will later wipe them out as pointless or
excessive or something.

Steve