On Thursday, November 3, 2011, David Richfield <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 1:55 PM, geni <[email protected]> wrote: >> Problem is a lot of books are rather questionable. However dead tree >> worship means people generally ask fewer questions. > > People should question book sources, but that doesn't mean that we > shouldn't be encouraging people to find them and use them. > >> The reality is >> that your average person is unlikely to access to journals and only >> have books to hand on a narrow range of subjects. > > If you have the web to hand, you have Google Books and Google Scholar > (which shows you which of the articles are full-text). >
That brings an idea to mind: would it be useful to have a way of trying to encourage people to find useful prospective book and journal sources that they don't necessarily have access to, and then having some uniform way of flagging them for review. Lots of people in and around academia can probably help here: librarians, Ph.D students etc. All that is needed is a way of basically encouraging people to put up "sources we're not sure about" on the talk page, and putting a flag on them (like enwp has for edit protected and edit semi-protected). Perhaps this could be part of the article feedback tool: "is this article missing a source? could you tell us what it is?" - this would automatically dump a new section on the talk page with whatever they type in, along with a template called something like "potential ref" which would add a category so someone could go and check up on it. And, yes, I do know that this may seem like I'm coming up with a solution to the huge backlog of unreferenced articles by creating a new backlog of "articles which need a reference check". ;-) -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
