[Obo-discuss] Using Wikipedia as a reference (definition source)

[Yockey, C. <cou...@as...>]

I really would recommend not doing this, using Wikipedia as a reference
for a definition.  The majority of academia and senior Wikipedia editors
do not consider Wikipedia to be an appropriate source to be cited.  The
question is what alternatives are there ... one might do a preliminary
definition sourcing from Wikipedia with the emblazoned caveat that these
require curation and replacement, then use the references provided
within the Wikipedia article as a source to support manual curation.  I
would not be surprised if a) you find a significant % of definitions in
Wikipedia lack citation support and b) a significant % of definitions
are sourced from places that you can't use the specified text from due
to copyright violations (just because Wikipedia content is CC-by-SA does
not mean that all of that content is appropriately licensable via
CC-by-SA ... there is a lot of sloppiness in that area).  -Courtland
Yockey / AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals / Wilmington, Delaware

 

From: Chris Mungall [mailto:cjm...@lb...] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2013 6:23 PM
To: obo...@li...
Subject: Re: [Obo-discuss] Referencing wikipedia - a suggestion

 

 

On Feb 25, 2013, at 12:39 PM, dosumis wrote:





Hi all,

 

Quick suggestion:

 

Working with OBO library ontologies, I often find wikipedia used as a
reference.  While an academic reference may be preferable, I think that
using wikipedia as a reference for a definition is completely
acceptable.  However, for this to be useful, it is essential to to use a
permalink to the version referenced. Without this there is no way to
read the original text that was used as a source for the definition.

 

Well it's possible of course, you just have to hunt through the previous
versions (Ben Good probably has a tool to do this automatically). But
not ideal.





e.g.- Don't use this:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex

 

or wikipedia:reflex.

 

Please go to the hiistory

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reflex&action=history

 

and choose the most recent dated version:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reflex&oldid=539529404

 

You can also do the marginally friendlier

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex?oldid=492849564

 

This is the URL dbpedia uses to connect a resoure such as
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Reflex to a page (via wasDerivedFrom)

 

	If there is general agreement on this (& I see now reason why
there shouldn't be), can we post this somewhere as a policy - perhaps on
the obo foundry site?

 

I think it's a good guideline moving forward. Of course, there are fair
number of citations to the nondated URL, individual groups have to
prioritize whether and when to retrofit these.

 

Do you want to put a page on this on the obofoundry.org wiki?





Cheers,

 

David

 

 

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