[Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While

[Shaun MacPherson]

Larry Sanger believes that the solution to make
Wikipedia more credible are with experts.  You can see
a good article descriping his criticisms here (
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/144207&tid=95&tid=1
) posted on Jan 3, 2004.

I think the easiest way to make Wikipedia more
credible is with a Fact and Reference Project, which
the community has been developing over a period of
more than a few months now: (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
).

The thing holding this project back, and ultimately
Wikipedia from sheading the skin of being
'noncredible' is the lack of intelligent foot/end
notes.  A way to format an article with autonumbering
endnotes for crossreferencing is lacking.  I am sure
with this feature programmed in this project can be on
its way to cross referencing all facts on Wikipedia. 
You can see some examples offoot/endnote formatting
template here.  JesseW has put much effort into trying
to create a formating guide here (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes ) and
another guide here (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cite_sources ).
 Examples are here (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check/Example_2/
).

How credible will Wikipedia be if each fact is
crossreferenced with 5, 10, 20 external sources like
academic journals, encyclopedias, books? Very.



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