User:Agradman/proposal

proposal for raising awareness about public domain, encyclopedic, html-text sources.
As you know, much of Wikipedia's growth has come from swallowing up public domain content from other encyclopedic sources. (For example: articles marked with 1911 contain stuff from the 1911 Britannica; similar sources have been listed here.   For a journalist's description of the phenomenon, do a full-text search for "Britannica" in this article.)

If the process of identifying these special sources were organized systematically, this high-quality content would be incorporated into Wikipedia at a much faster rate, and yet also in a more controlled, systematic, and supervised fashion.

I've made a rudimentary effort to create such a mechanism. The template was imperfectly written, so consider this a proof of concept.

You insert refideas at the top of an article's discussion page, and include a hyperlink to one or more of these special sources. The text of the template reminds editors that such content, properly cited, can be added to an article without infringing copyright.

In addition, the page will now automatically be listed in Category:Articles which could have free content incorporated from elsewhere. In the long run, this category will be a "portal" for people to make mindless, yet high-quality, edits to Wikipedia. I expect that some of the most transformative edits to articles like Coalworker's pneumoconiosis will be made by middle-school students who have no knowledge of the topic whatsoever -- simply by copying, pasting, and citing. For example, over the last month I created approximately 1000 articles using this Congressional Research Service Report, and credited the source using CRS, a new template created for the purpose.

A future edition of the template should allow you to indicate which of these sources have been "squeezed dry" of content (e.g., entries from the 11th edition of the Britannica would fit this condition.)

Thoughts? Andrew Gradman talk/WP:Hornbook 03:19, 3 August 2009 (UTC)