You may remember a few months ago I posted a call for people to share with me their experience of being the subject of a Wikipedia article. Well, I got a few responses and decided to use communications scholars as an illustration of how the much-debated notion of "notability" sometimes works on WP. The result has now been published in English; French and other versions were published last month. See http://mondediplo.com/2009/05/15wikipedia Cheers, Mathieu On Thu, 7 May 2009 10:23:11 +0200, Christophe Prieur <christophe.prieur@liafa.jussieu.fr> wrote:
Quite agree with Ismael, a reference to Wikipedia sounds to me like a footnote saying 'hey dude, look at the dictionary', if not just 'rtfm'. If you think an explanation is needed for some technical term, put it either in a few words or in a whole section, but if you choose not to, then leave it to the grown-up reader to look for further information.
My humble opinion of course but i guess you don't want to annoy those pedantic readers (including reviewers) that share it :)
-- Christophe.
Le 7 mai 09 à 09:50, Ismael Peña-López a écrit :
Dear Stefano,
Had I been the reviewer, I would have made the same observation.
It's not that I don't like Wikipedia: it's that I don't find it appropriate to cite _any_ dictionary and/or encyclopaedia at all in any kind of essay, including K-12.
And it's not that I take for granted that my potential audience might be aware of all the concepts, but I do take for granted that they are aware of the existence of dictionaries or handbooks (I neither include references to e.g. "Handbook of SPSS usage") they will use in case they don't understand a word or (say) "basic" concept.
In my opinion, it is opposite (as you already point at) to citing specific authors, or even specific methodologies developed by specific authors (following the former example I _would_ cite a statistical methodology developed and explained in a technical paper - but not on a generic handbook).
Put short, I personally find it annoying to find papers that begin as e.g. "Engagment, as it is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, deals with...". I'd rather have the main authors that have developed the term and have it defined by their own quotes.
Of course, strictly personal opinion :)
All the best,
Ismael Peña-López ICTlogy.net
Public Policies for Development and ICT4D School of Law and Political Science Open University of Catalonia _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/