On 10/29/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote: [snip]
It may just require some gentle acclimation into the Wikipedia culture---academics may be perfectly capable of providing references at will, but simply not know that Wikipedia would prefer references even for intro-level material that's commonly known in the field.
It's sometimes hard to convince someone that we're not trying to be mean when we tell them they must cite sources because when the look around Wikipedia they find homogeneous swaths of it uncited or poorly cited.
We have parallel problems with copyright violations and other areas where the active community has thoroughly agreed that Wikipedia should do X while most of Wikipedia still does Y.
I don't know of any magic solution to this but I think it's useful to point it out so folks keep it in mind when they remind people to conform to standards which differ from the implementation of many articles.