On 10/29/06, Delirium <delirium(a)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.