On 12/11/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Well, I think I've made it abundantly clear I disagree. Those mathematical articles should all be referenced. The person who is in the best position to do that is the original author.
For most of them, the original author is no better placed to reference them than anyone else, because they're results that appear in standard textbooks. I could singlehandedly "reference" most of the linear algebra articles, for example, just by copy/pasting the reference list from [[linear algebra]] to the end of every one. But in cases where something is a standard result in elementary textbooks, I don't see what advantage actually listing some arbitrarily chosen textbook gives the reader.
-Mark
Hmm, I've tried to think of an article that this would apply to, especially one which we haven't already written, and I really can't come up with one. Couldn't the author just reference the textbook that she actually used? For a strawman, let's take [[Myhill–Nerode theorem]]. I assume you didn't start that article from memory. You did use a source, right? Now given a few minutes of searching on Google print I could probably come up with a source to verify that information, but at the same time you could much more easily simply list the book you actually used.
Anthony