The idea is a good one, the idea of accessing material online came out of
something I suggested (and I seriously doubt I'm alone in doing) in
suggesting we find volunteers who could be trusted to verify the content of
books being used as references in the case of more contentious and
potentially problematic BLPs - asking people to go to libraries, find books
and verify what is being inferred in a reference actually exists in the
book.
If we can get access to those books for a small pool of trusted users,
administrators and such, then that would be brilliant, but I see a couple of
problems, I'd say 25% of our biographies are on fairly well known people
with plenty of reliable material freely available online, the Einsteins of
this world, the bulk of our biogs, say 50-60% are on less well known people
where information is harder to come by, but most likely accessible through
something like JSTOR, the remainder of our biogs - they would need access to
specialist press and publications, stuff that academic targeted resources
like JSTOR doesn't really include.
Of course, JSTOR and access to scientific journals could be useful in
improving the content of our articles on various scientific stuff, various
history journals for our articles of history and so on.
--
Nick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nick
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nick