I will be the first to celebrate when wiki markup disappears; however, I'm pretty skeptical that this is a community-wide plot to dissuade the non-technical from participating in Wikipedia. :) Re: citation in wikipedia Yes Yes Yes! Wikipedia could do a whole lot better here. Citation is one of the most important practices on the site and there is *practically no support for it.* This is partially a matter of social practice; however, I agree that it could be encouraged through the design of the editing environment too. In fact, we built a set of mediawiki extensions in 2005 that basically works as a shared end-note style bibliographic database for the whole wiki. Each reference has a page where the quality/appropriateness of the source itself can be discussed. Every article that cites the source links back to that reference page. Likewise, the reference page has links back to every article that cites it-a reverse citation index. We did all this because I am working with high school students to encourage information literacy skills and specific academic writing practices. It would be great to see these kinds of skills encouraged more broadly. Unfortunately, my code is woefully outdated... Andrea Andrea Forte PhD Candidate, Human-Centered Computing Electronic Learning Communities Lab Georgia Institute of Technology http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aforte -Andrea Forte (aforte@cc.gatech.edu) On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Gilles Frydman wrote:
On Feb 27, 2007, at 5:28 AM, Barry Wellman wrote:
I have been actively involved with Wikipedia for about 6 months, and have found it a good experience. I have been surprised by the accuracy of the articles (in general), the comprehensiveness of the articles (EB would never do one on Bronx gangs of the 1950s-1960s), and the activity of people in monitoring vandalism, sillyness, and fixing bad formats, etc.
Thank You! I believe that regular users of Wikipedia mostly agree with you. The "collective wisdom" demonstrated in Wikipedia is not an empty term. In fact we will soon start a project based on wikis used to improve the quality of "state-of-the-art peer-reviewed" medical information statements.
It's an interesting mixture of hierarchy and anarchy.
However, I do agree that editing procedures are cumbersome once you want to put in formatting, references, etc. Moreover, it's hard (for me) to find the guides for what to do, and when I do, the guides (as for Referencing) are not as clearly written as I'd like. We need _Wikipedia for Dummies_!
Editing procedures for accurate references is cumbersome due to the nature of the mediawiki code (the underlying code used by Wikipedia). Proper referencing in Wikipedia can only be done through one of the specialized parsing files, mostly Cite.php. That file adds 2 parser hooks to Mediawiki (<ref> and <references>, working together to create properly referenced footnotes). Unfortunately Cite.php is not part of the standard setup of wikis using Mediawiki and both its documentation and implementation are not trivial. The code (wikitext) needed by you, the wiki editors, to create references is VERY cryptic, making standardized referencing a tedious process.
Having said that, the standard Wikipedia response would be something like, "Stop complaining. Fix it yourself." Wish I could, but I have neither the expertise nor the time.
I believe that the only rational solution is the development of a standardized web interface used to produce properly formatted references that can then be added to the wikipedia entry. If someone with a very good knowledge of proper referencing is interested in this project, we could definitely develop such an interface in a short time and I would gladly make it an open service to the academic community.
To see an example of Cite.php in action, you can go to http://lo- wiki.acor.org/index.php/Cancer_Health_e-Communities.
This may be Wikiblasphemy, but I wonder if a core paid staff of clear technical writers would be useful for preparing such key help tasks.
Creating clear language documentation for all the Mediawiki extensions is very time consuming! You are talking about documenting the mutiple layers of code using hybrid programming languages. For every added feature of mediawiki you add one additional layer of obfuscation, making it almost impossible to create easy to use documentation of the feature. Wikipedia with all the bells and whistles is like a programing language tower of Babel :-)
-- Gilles Frydman ACOR.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
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