It’s amazing what resources are available online today, from your home computer. In addition to regular search engines, you have Google Scholar and Google Book Search. The New York Times has its entire archives online, with free access to articles after 1986, and more and more newspapers are deciding that advertising is now more profitable than collecting a fee every time someone reads an old article.
If that’s not enough, almost every town has the perfect resource for researching Wikipedia articles. That’s right—a public library. That library card languishing in your wallet may even let you go online, from your home computer, and do research via the library’s connections to various databases with indexes and often full-text sources. Research librarians are also happy to help you find whatever the library has to help you write a really good new article (or improve an existing one).
You’ll find that the “Research” section of Wikipedia:Article development (shortcut: WP:IA) has some useful information on researching in general, including online databases to which your library might give you access. Wikipedia also has a number of pages with links to research resources. In addition to the pages for public domain and GFDL resources mentioned on Don’t Repeat Someone Else’s Words at Length, these include:
Wikipedia also has a central place where you can get help from other editors: Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange (shortcut: WP:WRE). That page includes a number of resources offered by other editors (“Shared Resources”) and a section to ask for help getting copies of difficult-to-find things (“Resource Request”), as well as a section (“Free Online Resources”) that overlaps with some of the already mentioned pages.
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