Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
/me thinks we might need a "list of reputable textbooks which can be used as inline references" somewhere in Wikipedia: space...
I think such a list would be as useless as a "list of copyrighted images which can be fairly used in Wikipedia articles." Which articles are they reputable sources for, and for which facts within those articles?
Let's say we had a textbook that's been written by creationists as a tool to undermine the teaching of evolution in high school biology, and everyone knows it - it's a clumsy hack job. Obviously isn't a "reputable source" for information about evolution. But it's a great source to cite in [[Creationism]], or even in [[Evolution#Controversy]] (if such a section exists). So how does it get listed? I think it'd be much easier to just let people cite whatever they want and then if other editors have a problem with it they can work it out on the relevant article's talk page on a case-by-case basis.