There was an article in the New York Times a few days ago, on a related theme:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-to-redefine-knowledge-at-wikipedia.html?_r=2 One of its arguments was that there are whole cultures that lack published "reliable sources". Quote: ---o0o--- In the case of dabba kali, a children’s game played in the Kerala state of India, there was a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam, that included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but no sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40 million people who played it as children. There is no doubt, he said, that the article would have been deleted from English Wikipedia if it didn’t have any sources to cite. Those are the rules of the game, and those are the rules he would like to change, or at least bend, or, if all else fails, work around. “There is this desire to grow Wikipedia in parts of the world,” he said, adding that “if we don’t have a more generous and expansive citation policy, the current one will prove to be a massive roadblock that you literally can’t get past. There is a very finite amount of citable material, which means a very finite number of articles, and there will be no more.” ---o0o--- Andreas --- On Wed, 10/8/11, Ken Arromdee <arrom...@rahul.net> wrote: From: Ken Arromdee <arrom...@rahul.net> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] WP:RSs To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Date: Wednesday, 10 August, 2011, 16:40 On Tue, 9 Aug 2011, Carcharoth wrote: > My rule of thumb for self-published sources is to see if they cite > their sources. If they do, then you can check what they say. If they > don't, then you can't, and that can be a problem even with so-called > 'reliable' sources. This fails to be a useful method when the self-published source is the personal experience of a professional in the industry. This happens a lot with Internet publications, such as J. Michael Straczynski's postings in the Babylon 5 newsgroup, or Jim Shooter's blog (jimshooter.com). The standard Wikipedian's response to this quandry is "well, if they can't get a reliable source to quote them, it must not be that important in the first place", which ignores the realities of the modern Internet. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
