David Gerard wrote:
Ray Saintonge (saintonge@telus.net) [041213 20:03]:
Charles Matthews wrote:
David Gerard wrote
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references.
I'm happy if I can get a good book or two referenced, and an external link or so to corroborate. I am totally against having to footnote everything. That is a lame way to have to write - training wheels for Ph.D. students.
A sense of balance is important. We also can't confine ourselves to only peer-reviewed journals, as some seem to suggest.
I'm for footnoting quite a lot, particularly on contentious pages - I've seen how effective it can be in defusing editor conflicts. I'm thinking particularly of [[United Kingdon Independence Party]], the section on neo-Nazi infiltration. That was thrashed out between a UKIP supporter and myself (not a supporter) using sentences each of which was followed by a reference. The resulting paragraph is quite readable, getting its facts across nicely, and you can look up every assertion.
UKIP from the vantage point of someone outside the UK seems like a fringe party, but nevertheless worthy of some mention. Waiting for them to be analyzed in a peer-reviewed journal could be a long wait. It's a good example of the need to have an expanded corpus of acceptable references.
You'll have the occasional Adam Carr who just *knows* his stuff. But, as [[Wikipedia:Cite sources]] points out: "This applies even when the information is currently undisputed - even if there's no dispute right now, someone might come along in five years and want to dispute, verify, or learn more about a topic."
In the short run referencing needs to stress the more important and more realistic sources.
A culture of referencing will do wonders for the general standard of Wikipedia.
At this stage building the habit is far more important than determining the validity of references.
Ec