[WikiEN-l] Re: Plagiarism Policy, was A Missing Policy

Tue Jul 19 14:57:18 UTC 2005

On 7/19/05, Haukur Þorgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:
> > Clearly you should list each of the 4-5 online obituaries as sources.
> 
> I'd like to take this opportunity to disagree
> slightly with what I see as a fundamentalist view,
> namely that an article should always list as
> references exactly the sources that the editor
> had in front of herself while contributing to it.
> 
> I think that it's often more helpful for the reader
> to list other works. For example I often use my
> Icelandic books to find information, for example
> about bird species. But it's just not very useful for
> the typical reader of English Wikipedia to see those
> sources. Who is going to check them or use them?
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I often put Icelandic sources
> under the References heading - but I prefer to do
> it only for subjects where there aren't any English
> books with the same information. For subjects like
> bird species where there are plenty of good works
> in English (which I don't have) citing Icelandic
> sources is jarring and not appropriate (except,
> perhaps, for something like [[Fauna of Iceland]]).
> 
> As for a bio-article boiled out of 4-5 online
> obituaries I don't think listing those as references
> will be terribly useful. Typically half of them
> will be inaccessible after a couple of months.
> It doesn't hurt to mention them, though, perhaps
> on the talk page if you feel they won't be useful
> to the reader on the article page.
> 
> And the separation into References and Further reading
> is also somewhat artificial and not always appropriate.
> If these sections on [[Bobby Fischer]] (currently on FAC)
> are to be believed we're using a couple of online articles
> and a book called "Secrets Of Modern Chess Strategy" as
> References - whereas Fischer's actual biographies are
> listed as Further reading.
> 
> If the role of an encyclopedia is to be the starting
> point for further research. We should endeavour to list
> the *best works* in the bibliographies, not just whatever
> we happened to have in front of us while writing.
> 
> Regards,
> Haukur
> 

Hmmm... or is it just more that it might be embarrassing that the
actual article sources are not that authoritative? (indeed perhaps
just coming from a website!)

Wikipedia's detractors aren't making stuff up out of thin air, often
merely drawing on, and exaggerating, the cases where we fail.

I would suggest that in many cases where sources are not cited, it's
because they aren't good sources. And this happens all the time on
less scrutinised Wikipedia articles.

Doesn't mean it's not plagiarism though to use someone else's work and
not accredit it just because it's awkward for you to do so.

Zoney

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