On 7/19/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
Guettarda wrote:
Actually there are times when leaving something as "common knowledge" is
better than providing a source. Recently there was a discussion at
[[Evolution]] about a statement to the effect that evolution was
considered
to be responsible for the vast diversity of living
things and whether to
source that statement. It's very easy to find someone who has said that,
but to source it to anyone in particular could be misleading because it
implies that there is some special relationship between the idea and the
source. If something is common knowledge it should only be sourced if
the
sourcing helps to establist the origin or
development of the idea. Just
sticking in a source at random can be misleading.
Scientific papers manage this by citing common textbooks or well-known
survey-type monographs or articles, maybe even several of them to
emphasize the commonness of the knowledge; I don't think we can go
much wrong by following their example.
Some do, but that's bad form. Generally papers like that are badly written
papers by a grad student - the kind of papers which attribute information to
the wrong source (the kind that say X say xxx, when in fact X cites Y as
saying xxx). It looks sloppy and amateurish there, it looks equally
amateurish here.