dpbsmith(a)verizon.net writes:
I would really like to see more use of attributions,
references, citations within Wikipedia. Traditional
encyclopedias don't do very much of this, but I think
this is a serious weakness on their part. The
traditional encyclopedia simply speaks _ex cathedra_,
and the only reason you have for believing it is
that "they wouldn't print it if it weren't true."
...
I remember being shocked in high school when I learned
for the first time that an encyclopedia could not be
referenced in a scholarly article because it didn't meet
scholarly standards for attribution.
I agree; this is why I usually try to cite sources,
articles, interviews, etc. This fits in well with our NPOV
policy. Person X says Y about subject Z.
See, for example, our article on [[The Bible and history]],
which has a fairly extensive bibliography. More Wikipedia
articles need to refer readers to primary sources.
I don't know why print encyclopedias don't
choose to
reference their sources. Presumably it's limited space,
and/or a desire not to clutter up the article with
footnotes.
I am sure that this is precisely the problem they faced.
However, Wikipedia has no limitations on text; we have room
to document every important point in every article. We don
not even need to clutter up the main article to do so; if
footnotes or references ever get too long, we can add them
as a footnotes page, such as (proposed):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_footnotes
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History (footnotes)
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History/footnotes
Robert (RK)
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