David Gerard wrote:
On 08/04/2008, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
Everything is contraversial, and every article has cranks & the passionate trying to push junk into it.
See, this is actually entirely false. Almost no articles on Wikipedia are actually that controversial. (Greg Maxwell and Kim Bruning ran the numbers on this in January 2006.)
As I said, this appears to be a damage limitation exercise on the extreme cases - and is problematic in that it's messing up things for the vast majority.
I don't see how it messes things up for the vast majority, though. In uncontroversial cases, meticulous sourcing is still quite useful, as it lets the reader trace back claims to their source. This is nice if you want to do follow-up research, or to cite the fact in some context where citing Wikipedia isn't sufficient.
Plus, many claims turn out to be more controversial than the original author might have thought---I can't count how many hundreds of articles on ancient people I've come across that present particular dates as fact, when the chronology for many is controversial. At least when a date presented as fact is footnoted with a source you can figure out who to attribute the estimate to.
-Mark