[Wikipedia-l] Disclaimer notices and category systems

[Daniel Mayer]

Neil Harris wrote:
>At the moment, some articles have disclaimer 
>notices added (in addition to the general 
>disclaimer covering the whole encyclopedia, 
>of course). The new MediaWiki namespace has 
>recently improved things by allowing the text 
>of article disclaimer notices to be standardised 
>and updates automated. 

I think these disclaimers are very ugly and make us
look unprofessional (most reference works don't start
their articles with disclaimers!). I also think they
are a bad idea since their absence implies that
somebody should be able to trust the content. It is
also self-referential and has links to a
Wikipedia-namespace page. Having too many of these
links adds an extra burden on third party users of our
content who would want to remove the
Wikipedia-specific references. 

It is ''far'' better IMO just to have a link to
[[Wikipedia:Disclaimers]] at the bottom of every page.
In fact I think I'll go ahead and do that this
weekend. 

That would get rid of the need to place these ugly
notices everywhere. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) 

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