David Gerard wrote:
Steve Bennett wrote:
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.
To some extent we can make use of "standard" references. The Internet Movie Data Base is a good example for movies, but that won't work for everything. Many subjects, however, are more controversial and the standards there need to be more stringent .
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.")
Editorial judgement is important. Google is really a mixed blessing on this. Simply saying that something gets some number of Google hits is not enough. One needs to make a critical evaluation of those linked sites. One needs to distinguish between an academic study and somebody's blog.. Speaking as a person for whom book collecting is an addiction I have many references that I can use, but that is not convenient for many people. The first versions of material may not be perfect, and the verifying material may not be perfect. When material is challenged there must be reasonable time its supporters to find verification.
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