On Sun, 29 Apr 2007, Todd Allen wrote:
I don't generally see such things as worth arguing over. If someone -really- wants a citation for that, or that the Earth's atmosphere is mainly nitrogen and oxygen, or that Einstein was a physicist, you can find one in thirty seconds. If something is really as obvious as you think it is, citation is trivially easy.
This may be true if it's one person demanding one citation. This is not so much the case if someone demands twenty citations, each for a different obvious fact. (Or if they slap "citation needed" on a whole paragraph or section and demand citations for all the obvious facts without trying to list them individually.)
It also takes a lot longer than thirty seconds to correctly format a citation. And citations are harder to find than you think. Most sources you'll find in a thirty second search will be self-published web pages, and we can't use self-published sources. Even just figuring out whether or not a web page is self-published within the Wikipedia meaning takes longer than 30 seconds.