Re: a little something for all you wikipedia-lovers

Am 28 Jan 2007 06:35:56 -0800 schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

On Jan 28, 2:20 am, Helmut Richter <h...@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 27 Jan 2007, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Jan 27, 6:30 pm, Joachim Pense <s...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Am 27 Jan 2007 15:10:42 -0800 schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki

Quoting an encyclopedia as an academic source looks like a strange
idea, wiki or printed. Their purpose is to provide introductive
information to the uninformed, not to serve as a quotable resource for
research.

Maybe the humanities have a different idea on this?

For those who haven't looked at the article, it describes several
institutions that have banned college students from citing wikipedia
in papers. (Not from consulting it, because "sometimes it offers good
bibliographies.")I think, when Joachim wrote "[Q]uoting an encyclopedia as an academic
source looks like a strange idea, wiki or printed", his point was that
Wiki has no - positive or negative - difference from printed encyclopedias
in *this* respect. If you replace "Wikipedia" by "Encyclopedia Britannica"
or "Der Große Brockhaus", everything remains correct. These works are not
intended as quotable resources, and should not be blamed for failing to be
such what they were not made for.

No, the HUGE difference is that anyone at all, no matter how qualified
or unqualified, can contribute or change anything whatsoever. See
Dylan's response to you for a rather egregious -- and uncontroversial
-- example.

The editors of real encyclopedias at least _try_ to get qualified
authors to write their contributions, and usually have subject-editors
who are familiar enough with the topic to query possible
misstatements. (For instance, the consultant for Encyclopedia
Britannica 15 (1974)'s language and linguistics articles was Eric
Hamp, and he did a damn good job.)

So is it really acceptable to cite Britannica (rather than a research
paper or monography) in a research article? What would be a reason to
do so?

Joachim


--
Action, Urgency, Excellence
(*** Brown)
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