Steven Krivit wrote:
I am editing papers for a REAL encyclopedia. Every once in a while
authors will submit papers that include references to Wikipedia. I
tell them all that such references are unacceptable. End of story.
I have edited many books and papers. I might suggest that an authors
not use a reference but I would never tell them what to do! Unless
they are employees.
As Stephen Lawrence pointed out, Wikipedia often lists useful
references. You should cite the original document rather than the
Wikipedia article.
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
And BTW Wiki isn't the only imperfect encyclopedia. If you could be a
fly on the wall in the board room of Britannica I bet you'd find there
are an awful lot of problems over there these days, too (tho their
problems most likely all concern survival).
There was a well publicized comparison made of Britannica versus
Wikipedia a few years ago. Conclusion:
"Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as
Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world
around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature."
http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
I hate to admit it, but Wikipedia really is a good source of
information for many topics. It is not good for some controversial
and politicized topics such as cold fusion, but for matter, neither
is Nature magazine, Scientific American and probably not Britannica.
(I haven't checked the latter.)
The Wikipedia article on Japanese language had some serious problems
when I last checked it. I described some of the problems in another forum:
I am not sure if the problems are still there . . . There were
mistakes that seemed to be written by an enthusiastic person who has
recently begun studying the language. He or she was trying to
construct sample sentences in Japanese that were too much like
English and that no native speaker would use. If you are going to use
samples, you have to either find them in Japanese text somewhere or
ask a native speaker. You might copy one from a highly authoritative
source such as Martin, which has thousands of sample sentences, all
carefully sourced.
The problem was not that the person was obstinate or aggressive. He
just does not know enough about the subject to write about it.
There are some on-line resources for translators which are
crowd-sourced, such as the Eijiro dictionary. . . . [To contribute]
you fill in a form and supply a URL if you have one. You cannot edit
the dictionary directly, but someone there gathers up the changes and
implements them. So it is lightly peer-reviewed. A person could
probably not add an amateur mistranslation, or a deliberate malicious
change. There are also more formal on-line resources such as Prof.
Breen's WWWJDIC. . . . You might say these are crowd-sourced but
everyone in the crowd is known to be bilingual and a translator.
- Jed
