On 1/19/07, Steve Block <steve.block(a)myrealbox.com> wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The Renaissance Wikipedian who is not associated
with a university has
to make do with what he can find. If all he can find is internet
material it will shape and limit his perceptions. Fact checking should
be one of our jobs, but doing that effectively depends on having access
to information.
I have been meaning to ask this. Has it ever been explored that the
Foundation look at getting some subscriptions to archives and the like
and allowing a reference team access to those subscriptions to do some
fact checking?
This was talked about a few months ago, as well. Any reasonable collection
would probably cost more money than we have; and then there's the question
of what (and what subjects) to buy -- there's no one "right answer" for
databases and archives for most subjects, especially given the relative
obscurity of much of what is getting fact-checked around here. I don't think
the general databases would be much help. If anyone has any particular ideas
about specific products that would be very helpful, I'd be happy to do some
price-checking for various models and report back. The usual institutional
academic license (based on # of users) obviously wouldn't work for us so
there would have to be some pretty heavy negotiation with pubishers.
However! There's more than a few Wikipedians with access to world-class
university collections, and that *can* scale. There's these two projects
currently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Newspapers_and_magazines_request_ser…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_resources
(The latter needs to be revived and brought up to date). How to make these
services more useful, so as to distribute research work?
There's three parts to it:
- knowing where to look and having access to the appropriate resource
- doing the actual searching for a topic
- just picking up a known citation out of a digital archive or journal and
sending it to someone.
None of these things take exactly the same skill set; the first is
traditionally the work of librarians, while anyone with access can do the
last. Searching falls somewhere in the middle. I would love to see some kind
of a 'fact-check' network set up to take advantage of what all we might have
access to.
-- phoebe
p.s.: in re: your SciAm issues, Ray, it looks like it's been fully digitized
from 1845-1908, and then from 1993-present, but not the stuff in the middle
yet. Access to digitization (and subsequent drop in use for the printed
copies) is probably why the print issues got dumped; that and lack of space
for something that has a lot of duplicates around the country and can thus
be ILL'ed if anyone desperately needs the paper.