[WikiEN-l] Tying Threads together (Was: ezresults not playing fair?)

Thu Jan 15 18:42:50 UTC 2004

Maz's mention of ezresults misusing material form WP reminds me of a
research problem I had this week -- which relates to another thread
in this maillist.

I've been rewriting the article on king [[Hezekiah]] of the ancient kingdom
of Judah (my work is up on the English Wikipedia, if you're curious), &
encountered the problem that the material an anonymous contributor added
that Hezekiah's reign could be dated by an eclipse conflicts with the
dates of two widely-quoted scholars. So I thought to use Google to
investigate just who "Professor Aurel Ponori-Thewrewk" was, & learn just
what he said in the cited article, & how reliable of an authority he was.

The anon contributor only provided an incomplete citation for Ponori-Thewrewk's
work, so I cut-n-pasted about ten words including his name into Google to
see what I could find -- which was two different sites that were using
Wikipedia material. Fortunately, both credited WP as the source, & had
the proper licensing notice attached. (I couldn't find the reference page
that lists known users of our material to see if they were listed. Thanks,
Mav, for the link.)

As for Prof. Ponori-Thewrewk? Except for some pages in German & Hungarian
(the German ones appeared to be either from a college catalog of classes
or a reading list; I don't understand Hungarian at all), the only explanation
for who he was came from another Wikipedia page -- [[eclipses]] -- which
identified him as the former director of the Budapest Planetarium. I still
have no idea what he actually asserted concerning the sundial mentioned in
2 Kings 20:8-11.

Just an example of why including proper citations ("X says Y") is important,
not only for NPOV reasons. (To tie in still another thread.)

Geoff