On 10/3/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
Right. So consider a paragraph including a reference that gets cut out and turned into its own article. And you put a very brief summary sentence where the paragraph used to go, and you link to the new article.
Problem: the number of references in the original article just went down by 1. Are you seriously saying that we really need to come up with another reference for the sentence? The actual reference is still there in the new article and it is surrounded by text that it justifies.
Well, is the statement (if not necessarily the original text) that was referenced still present in the summary article or not? If it is, just leave the reference in place (in addition to copying it to the new article, of course); there's nothing wrong, per se, with duplicated references.
You can, of course, do a number of other things:
1. Add a footnote that says something like "For sources corroborating this point, see [[New article]]." It's not necessarily the cleanest form of citation, but at least it gives readers and future editors an explicit trail to the references. 2. Condense the citations. For example, if you replace a paragraph with five citations with a one-sentence summary, cite all five sources for it.