On 9/29/06, Mak makwik@gmail.com wrote:
Inline citations have now been added to Dido and Aeneas, easily enough (there are no page numbers given, because Grove online doesn't have page numbers, and this particular article is short enough to not have sub-sections). The point is that if reasonable references are given, inline citations should not be necessary for uncontroversial facts. If you look at actual encyclopedias, you will notice that they don't have inline references, especially for generally accepted facts.
That's true, but is also misleading. You don't see those references in the *end product*.
But encyclopedia's do check the sources of their statements. I highly recommend that you listen to this:
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Archives Validation on Wikipedia: How do I know this article is accurate?
1) An expert writes an article. 2) A fact checker checks *every statement* in the article from at least 2 reliable sources and documents all of them on a newspaper sized sheet where the article text is in the middle of the sheet and the rest contains the references, annotations, recommended changes. All this material is kept for later editors. (Forward to 27:00 in the MP3).
Yet, the reader doesn't see all those inline references in the end product. But they can trust that this validation does happen throughout the editing process. A Wikipedia reader doesn't have that luxury, they can't tell apart checked facts and sneaky vandalism inserted 2 minutes ago.
Inline references are very important. Much more important for Wikipedia than the published version of a traditional encyclopedia.
-- nyenyec