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

Tue Jul 19 19:00:26 UTC 2005

There is a difference between the references consulted in writing the  
article (required to avoid plagiarism) and the nice list of external  
resources recommended for further study.

Fred

On Jul 19, 2005, at 8:10 AM, Haukur Þorgeirsson 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
>
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