[Wikipedia-l] Wish List

Thu Oct 26 13:56:55 UTC 2006

"David Goodman" <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote
in message
news:480eb3150610252215r984ab43tabbbc82247690382 at mail.gmail.com...
> On 10/25/06, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge at 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)