Steve Bennett wrote:
The thing is, for many people, editing is *fun*. I
actually honestly
gain pleasure from taking an unstructured 1000 word article and turning
it into a 500 word structured one. Finding references is *work*. If you
know something to be true, to find a reputable refernce to back you up
is simply hard work in many cases. "no original research" says that if
something is true, it should be easy to find a reputable reference -
well, it isn't always.
I sometimes write something off the top of my head then Google for any
tolerable reference that'll do for the moment ;-)
There really should be different sourcing guidelines
for different
fields in Wikipedia - popular culture is just "different" to history,
science or geography.
Some sort of referencing should be possible. For TV or movie synopses,
the text itself as an implicit reference is obvious and sufficient, for
example.
I also suspect that a guideline could say somewhere
that if it's
possible to verify something on google, then that may be good enough in
some circumstances. As opposed to making a claim that cannot be
verified even by someone searching the entire internet.
If there's nothing else, that's fine again IMO. Any usable reference is
better than none.
(Though that's not to say that really crappy references will do just
because they're on the net somewhere. One has to use that thing called
"editorial judgement.")
- d.