Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but
there's no need to cite eight
instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and
rationalise some of the sources.
If you're talking about citing some particular factoid, then yeah,
citing more than 2 sources would be unusual. For an example of a
situation where I did it, see [[Kate McTell]] - there's a bit where I
list like 3 sources that say Ruby Glaze was a pseudonym, and 3 that
say they were separate people. Similarly if you have something really
controversial, then there are times that 10 footnotes for one sentence
might be appropriate...
(but in general, 1's good! :))
Not necessarily. A lot of innocent distortion can happen through the
sloppy use of language. Several newspapers, all relying on the same and
only source from a wireservice, can end up with amazingly different
articles.
Recently a local newspaper, after running a survey in a high school came
up with the headline, "50% of students smoke because it's cool." My
first reaction was that I didn't think that the overall smoking rate was
that high. When I read the whole article I found that indeed the
overall rate of smoking was only 25%, and that the reference in the
headline was to only half of that.
Your story about the McTell article points not only to the need to cite
sources, but to the need to trace those sources. That's an even more
difficult process. If the distortion is frequently cited in our sources
we then need to document this error to avoid its being perpetuated.
Ec