[Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

Thu Nov 3 06:27:38 UTC 2011

A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich
source of bad references.  We should rather be looking at ways to get
references to books and journal articles.  Web references should be
the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of
websites are not WP:RS.

How about a wizard-like tool which asks "did you read this in a book,
in a newspaper, a journal article or on the web?" and if the answer is
"on the web" asks the user how they know it's true.  Compare for
example Commons's image uploader.  Users who care about references
should be taught how to extract good refs from Google Books and Google
Scholar - both quite easy to use.  If you paste the ISBN of a book
into Citation Expander, it fills in the whole citation for you, and
the same for pubmed IDs.  Now we just need a tool which will do this
for major newspapers on the web.

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0