[WikiEN-l] Citizendium charter ratified

[Charles Matthews]

  On 27/09/2010 04:13, Carcharoth wrote:

<snip>

> There is plenty of obscure stuff that you still have to look up behind
> paywalls, or look for specialised publications (books and journals and
> monographs). I find myself coming across stuff like that all the time,
> but it is true that Wikipedia is often a convenient *starting* point
> for digging deeper. But if I don't find what I want on Wikipedia, I
> keep looking.
Indeed.  "Comprehensive" is important, but "inclusive of starting points 
for research" rather more so. Think of the difference between "stub" and 
"FA" in those terms and you're getting somewhere. I think CZ missed a 
trick by not getting the whole gamut.
> Of the free (i.e. non-paywall) sources available, the
> best for my purposes is often the book scans found at archive.org and
> on Google Books. In theory, as anyone can access those, they will
> eventually be used to source Wikipedia articles, but for obscure
> subjects that will take a very long time.
That seems not to be quite right. The recent gadget to locate our 
sources of links found Google Books at the top of the heap. My own 
researches show that Google Books is quite intensively used for 
referencing, for just such "obscure subjects". I do have my own axe to 
grind here (basically archive.org material being sent to Wikisource for 
much better presentation); but that is what takes time. Traditional 
chaos still reigns, but our purposes tend to make sense of what is out 
there.

Charles