On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Carl Beckhorn <cbeckh...@fastmail.fm> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 04:58:01PM -0500, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: >> Remembering that the thrust of this argument was specifically the use of >> Encyclopedia Brittanica, news magazines and newspapers. That doesn't >> necessarily sound like a low standard to me. Does it to you? > > It seems like a low standard to me: > > * Using encyclopedias for inline citations isn't a reliability problem, > but it's a symptom of shallow research and generally bad scholarship. > Citations should lead readers to sources that cover the cited > topic in greater depth than the WP article, rather than to other > encyclopedias which are unlikely to do so. > > * Building the majority of an article from newspaper sources is not > a reliability problem at the level of the individually-sourced > pieces of information. However, it's exactly the type of synthesis > of primary sources that has been decried for academic articles. > And, in many cases, it suffers from the bias of newsmedia to > cover things that will sell papers in much greater depth than > topics that are of less popular interest.
Maybe you could specifically contrast two biographies I mentioned earlier? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_(inventor) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace Those are two very different types of articles in terms of the sources they use and the way they are constructed from those sources and the assumptions and inferences made by the editors of those articles. Discuss! :-) Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
