[WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium

[phoebe ayers]

On 1/19/07, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> > The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated with a university has
> > to make do with what he can find.  If all he can find is internet
> > material it will shape and limit his perceptions.  Fact checking should
> > be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access
> > to information.
>
> I have been meaning to ask this. Has it ever been explored that the
> Foundation look at getting some subscriptions to archives and the like
> and allowing a reference team access to those subscriptions to do some
> fact checking?


This was talked about a few months ago, as well. Any reasonable collection
would probably cost more money than we have; and then there's the question
of what (and what subjects) to buy -- there's no one "right answer" for
databases and archives for most subjects, especially given the relative
obscurity of much of what is getting fact-checked around here. I don't think
the general databases would be much help. If anyone has any particular ideas
about specific products that would be very helpful, I'd be happy to do some
price-checking for various models and report back. The usual institutional
academic license (based on # of users) obviously wouldn't work for us so
there would have to be some pretty heavy negotiation with pubishers.

However! There's more than a few Wikipedians with access to world-class
university collections, and that *can* scale. There's these two projects
currently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newspapers_and_magazines_request_service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_resources

(The latter needs to be revived and brought up to date). How to make these
services more useful, so as to distribute research work?

There's three parts to it:
- knowing where to look and having access to the appropriate resource
- doing the actual searching for a topic
- just picking up a known citation out of a digital archive or journal and
sending it to someone.

None of these things take exactly the same skill set; the first is
traditionally the work of librarians, while anyone with access can do the
last. Searching falls somewhere in the middle. I would love to see some kind
of a 'fact-check' network set up to take advantage of what all we might have
access to.

-- phoebe

p.s.: in re: your SciAm issues, Ray, it looks like it's been fully digitized
from 1845-1908, and then from 1993-present, but not the stuff in the middle
yet. Access to digitization (and subsequent drop in use for the printed
copies) is probably why the print issues got dumped; that and lack of space
for something that has a lot of duplicates around the country and can thus
be ILL'ed if anyone desperately needs the paper.