"David Goodman" <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote
in message
news:480eb3150610252215r984ab43tabbbc82247690382@mail.gmail.com...
On 10/25/06, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
>
> David Goodman wrote:
> >
> >(Nor should old textbooks be cited on WP except for historical
interest).
This last bit is not realistic. While it is
still preferable to cite
the most recent edition, the fact is that people cite the edition that
is available to them. We cannot require people to go out and buy the
most recent edition before contributing. It's up to subsequent editors
to update the information if they have something more recent.
We can expect our editors to use libraries. (And if you
can't or don't want to work that way, there's an immense amount to write
on
WP. There's a great many topics--academic topics
even--that can best be
written with available Internet sources. )
Is your goal to produce a WP useful for 2006, or 1996? It would be very
interesting to deliberately invent an encyclopedia appropriate for some
specific earlier historical period, but many of the users may be more
interested in the present.
It appears that you are refuting the viability of creating an encyclopedia
iteratively, and that only complete, accurate, verified and peer-reviewed
articles should be allowed on Wikipedia.
Surely information from 1996 is still valuable, in the absence of anything
more up-to-date? Don't tell me that a textbook about Shakespeare will have
changed so much in the last 10 years that its information is worthless!
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)