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.