On 7/26/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Without such a mechanism, we could end up with more footnotes than there are sentences in many articles. Just looking at [[en:Paris]] for the moment, this is the first paragraph:
"Paris is the capital city of France, as well as the capital of the Ile-de-France region, whose territory encompasses Paris and its suburbs. The city of Paris proper is also a departement, called Paris departement (French: departement de Paris)."
These are facts that might be worth getting citations for: [1] Paris is the capital city of France. [2] Paris is the capital of the Ile-de-France region. [3] The Ile-de-France region's territory encompasses Paris and its suburbs. [4] The city of Paris proper is also a departement, called Paris departement.
Presumably citations for these can be found in French law, and would be useful to have somewhere---someone might conceivably actually want to know exactly where it is specified officially that Paris is the capital city of France. But I'm not sure we'd want to present readers with a barrage of footnotes for all these facts that they might take as fairly obvious---by the time you got the end of the article we might be on footnote #200.
The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of France so far have kept their activities secret.
If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite.