Comments on: You Could Look It Up

By: StoneyB

StoneyB — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:51:40 +0000

That's about the size of it. And if they'd asked me I'd have named the canonical five reasons Again?, Not My Department, Don't Ask Don't Tell, Huh?, and Who Cares?

By: Jason Orendorff

Jason Orendorff — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:20:15 +0000

What I took away from this post is that "General Reference" should be renamed to "Just Look It Up".

By: StoneyB

StoneyB — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 02:32:44 +0000

If I’d had my druthers I’d have expanded that section of the post to four or five thousand words! —and I think that should happen somewhere on ELU. ... For the sake of what in my line of business is loathsomely called “consistent messaging”, I drew my categories in the first link I mentioned, (eliminating a category for which no on-line references were provided). I included Corpora because this includes Google Books and Ngrams, which are easy to use; to be sure, they’re also even easier to abuse, but they share that drawback with all the other sorts of reference. No online “encyclopedia”—which for all practical purposes means Wikipedia—is recommended in either of the ELU links I provided, and Wikipedia is explicitly deprecated as a reference in another ELU link. I think, moreover, that although we frequently cite Wikipedia to explain our answers, it’s not usually a source a user would go to in the first instance to answer the sort of question that gets closed as GR.

By: Martha

Martha — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:47:00 +0000

I would never in a million years consider a corpus a "general reference" source. Most of them are damn hard to use, and the results they return are subject to interpretation.

What is a general reference source that you don't mention is an encyclopedia.