Re: a little something for all you wikipedia-lovers

On 28 Jan 2007 11:38:25 -0800, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1170013105.222944.54000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

Brian M. Scott wrote:

On 28 Jan 2007 10:40:46 -0800, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1170009646.840896.286660@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

On Jan 28, 1:12 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 28 Jan 2007 08:31:06 -0800, "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1170001865.970364.82760@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

On Jan 28, 10:28 am, Joachim Pense <s...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:[...]

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?

For some of the history-of-linguistics things I've done, encyclopedia
articles are excellent sources for the "common wisdom" of their age.

This is irrelevant. When you do that, you're not using it
as a general reference, but rather as a primary source, much
as one might use the Paston letters as a primary source for
15th century English social history. Its quality as a
reference work is not at issue in such applications.

Which I trust answers grapheus's question, and which provides a
further differentiation between Britannica and wikipedia,

Well, no. As you've been told many times, each Wikipedia
article has associated with it both a history page, which
contains all prior versions of the article, and a discussion
page, on which those who are interested may discuss possible
changes.

And no control over who contributes to the "versions" or
to the "discussions." If Brian Scott "discusses" the
damage done to his initial article on [whatever the
topic of Brian's dissertation may have been], how is any
user to know that Brian is any more qualified to discuss
it than anyone else?

First, by now I probably would not be more qualified than
anyone else. Secondly, if I chose to do so, I could always
point to
<http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml?id=9569>
(though I'd have to note that the last seven letters of the
title have disappeared: the last word should be
'Paracompact'). But in my field the competence of the
people discussing a topic is likely to be evident very
quickly, and there's little room for differences of opinion
about the facts.

Whereas, if Brian Scott was invited to write an
encyclopedia article on the topic of his dissertation,
it's there in the encyclopedia in exactly the form in
which he was the most qualified person in the world to
present it.

Not necessarily: someone else might be a better expositor,
or better able to put it into a larger context.

This is a rich source of primary evidence of the
range of opinions on various subjects, evidence that could
obviously be appropriately cited in moderately ambitious
undergraduate papers in a number of sociological topics.

And no control over the validity of those "opinions."

Irrelevant to the point that I was making.

Should the Afrocentrist view of the relationship between
Egyptian and Wolof, or between Mandinke and Dravidian,
be given equal consideration with the scientific view?

Have you actually looked at articles dealing with such
things to find out what actually happens? No, of course
not. But to pick two that came readily to mind, the article
on 'Proto-World language' is properly skeptical, and the
article on 'Altaic languages' looks to be a pretty
up-to-date summary of the history and current status of the
notion.

and for which reason, totally banning citing EB in college
work is unwise.

So is totally banning the citing of Wikipedia, or even
<shudder> the World Book.

Hey, in my 1961 World Book, the Writing articles are by I. J. Gelb.
(They're not in the current edition.) They would be excellent for the
grade-schoolers and junior-high-schoolers it's intended for. What
seems to be the last edition of Collier's (ca. 1980; it's on the shelf
in the NYPL's main reading room) has a superb article on Writing by my
phonology teacher the Sinhala expert Jim Gair, which was at least 20
years old, as he's credited as Assistant Professor; I think its
audience was high-schoolers, and is excellent for them.

It's the lazy way out. The
proper course of action is to (try to) teach students to use
sources appropriately. But if you're going to be that lazy,
it would be far more principled to ban the citing of *all*
general reference encyclopaedias: the differences among them
are precisely the sorts of considerations that you've
already decided your students can't handle.

Do college libraries even _have_ World Book?

If not, I expect that they have things equally likely to be
totally inappropriate, which was the point. The real
problem faced by the Middlebury history department has
nothing to do with Wikipedia; they're merely putting a
Band-Aid on its most visible symptom (and incidentally
ignoring a splendid opportunity to teach something that in
the long run is likely to be more valuable to most of their
students than any specific historical content).

[...]

Bluntly, your attitude towards Wikipedia is irrational. You
completely ignore considerable evidence that your concerns,
which would have been entirely legitimate early on, are in
fact greatly exaggerated. You completely ignore the fact
that in general the quality of the articles has gone
steadily up. You completely ignore the ways in which
Wikipedia is superior to dead tree references, namely,
timeliness and breadth of coverage.

Please note that I'm by no means an uncritical user; in the
early going I was very skeptical, and even now I'm well
aware of Wikipedia's shortcomings. The fact remains that I
now find it extremely useful and expect it to become more so
as it continues to improve. In mathematics -- admittedly a
special case -- it's already the best single general
reference available for my more advanced undergraduates.
(Wolfram's MathWorld may indeed be 'the web's most extensive
mathematics resource', but Wikipedia is typically more
accessible.)

Brian
.

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