David Goodman wrote: > 1. The best role of a librarian is to teach other people how to do research,
Well, are they "librarians" or "teachers" in information science? > ''How Wikipedia Works'' (http://howwikipediaworks.com/ the free online > version.) Ah. Apparently only chapter 12 is "free." Does someone here have a copy they would like to share? Or maybe a torrent link? > 2, Another excellent goal is to help people do their searches,, > because it is not the least trivial to "formulate search strings." > and have someone else run them on the data bases they have access to. I think that for the most part, the way to formulate search strings begins as a written expression: The statement in the request comes in the form of some ostensibly factual expression -- one that simply needs corroboration with some similar expression to be validated and sourced. Then others -- even those who aren't going to perform the search itself -- can reformulate those expressions into search strings, while leaving the core expression intact. The resulting phrases can then be compared side-by-side with the original expression. > The art of a librarian or other proper literature searcher is rather > more complex: selecting the best database to run it , formulating the > proper search statement, evaluating the preliminary results, and then > repeating the necessary number of iterations until one finds just what > one does want or concludes it isn't there. > I typically do about 3 or 4 intermediate searches before I think I > get it right-. Well, it will no doubt be a challenge you can handle. > If I get it right the first time, it's only because of > many years of knowledge in doing these searches. We're not > technicians. Its not always necessary to have expertise or even deliberate choice in the matter, is it? For example on [[Talk:American Dream]], Binksternet was an unwitting "sourcewalla" -- not a truly neutral sourcewalla, Binksternet in fact disliked my inserting the language "ethos of prosperity" into the AD lede. He reverted my edit and complained about it, but in a stroke of (helpful) genius, Bink listed some Google Book search returns (string: 'ethos of prosperity') as examples of my erroneous original research: None of these sources, he said, at all validated my conceptualization "ethos of prosperity." My contribution was then to simply read the sources he helped find, and then to demonstrate in a detailed and obtusely incontrovertible way how at least two of these sources actually *did corroborate my language "ethos of prosperity," in absolutely no ambiguous terms. Side note: In typical fashion, this opponent also just sort of dropped the issue without conceding or undoing his unnecessary reverts. I had also stated that his own unsourced writing (correcting mine) "ethos of idealism" was "not even English." Which, in retrospect probably did not inspire him to continue being helpful. So, the sourcewalla idea does not just mean that partisanship can be removed from sourcing, but that the citation onus is less asinine, article disputes can be resolved more quickly, people such as myself will not feel the need to resort to sarcasm and trout to overcome their obtuse opposition, and the one(s) who do(es) the revert will also feel like actually undoing their reverts (WP:CIVIL) instead of just walking away after making a mess to begin with. > 3. I do not advise testing how far AGF gets us with or some of the > more hostile publishers in law and engineering. In the views of these "hostile publishers," is it we who are the "hostile publisher?" -Stevertigo "for all the honest world to feel... _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
