On 04/10/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hmmmm. Articles get refactored a *lot* around here, though.
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.
If you keep doing that repeatedly, you end up with a completely unreferenced orginal article. But the amount of references in the wikipedia has not gone down.
That's why I consider that a summary page in many cases needs few if any references.
Yes, I know the policy. The policy is wrong in this kind of case. A very well-linked article needs very few external references. I think the FA process needs to count credit for internal references as if they were external references; not at 1:1, but some number:1; 10:1 internal to external or something.
At the moment it's too all or nothing: ALL ARTICLES NEED REFERENCES. INTERNAL LINKS DO NOT COUNT! Um. So refactoring is a bad thing then? I DON'T CARE. EXTERMINATE- EXTERMINATE!
:-)
- d.