On 3/31/06, flogan1(a)swarthmore.edu <flogan1(a)swarthmore.edu> wrote:
Hello list! I'm new to the list, so perhaps a short intro is in order. My
name is Finlay and I am known to WP as Cantara. I've been a Wikipedian since
sometime in 2004, but have only become really active in the last few months.
I joined the list at the suggestion of CComMack, who thought that an idea I
had (see below) might want input from people knowledgeably about policy and
so forth.
My idea is this. We all know that Wikipedia is great and all, repository of
the world's information, &c. However, there are people who disagree, who
think that Wikipedia is inaccurate because it is written by people who are
not experts and because it lacks oversight (or whatever it is they're saying
now). When considering these two things together, I realized that there is a
kind of information that Wikipedia seriously lacks, and that is
bibliographies. If you've written a research paper lately (I'm writing two at
the moment, myself) you know that the list of books that the author has read
is just as valuable as whatever the book itself is about. However,
Wikipedians don't really make an effort to include "further reading" as
part
of the entry, beyond what they list as citations.
I wanted to start a project to focus on getting that store of information
into Wikipedia, and once I get around to it I'll list it on Proposed
Projects. However, as mentioned about, a fellow editor suggested that a
project like this might have repurcussions in other areas (and I hope he
responds to explain what they were - something about the manual of style?).
Discuss, then, and if you'd like to help, I'll have information up somewhere
on my userpage fairly soon.
Yours,
Cantara
Hi Finlay,
I think there's real merit to this idea, and, though I understand the
previously mentioned problems of blindly adding books for the sake of
it or adding books for commercial interest, this needn't deter people
from building (and then accessing) a comprehensive bibliography on a
given subject.
I agree this could be done better in Wikipedia in general (though
there are obvious good examples where this *is* done well). But I'm
thinking this could fit quite well with Wikiversity (another proposed
project), which will (amongst other things) assemble a network of
references for further reading on a topic. You can see details for
this project at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Modified_project_proposal -
though there is much more information on this (something I'm working
on at the moment).
What do you think?
Cormac
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