On 9/29/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Verifiability is important and in most cases, references are *good* - the reader has no idea who the authors are, so only has the text and maybe what references are clickable to figure out the text's value from. Do please continue :-)
- d.
What citations do is massively simplify the process of verifying any given statement. If a statement is not specifically cited, it could, for all the reader knows, come from anywhere in any of the books used as references, which, on most articles, would be a large amount of material to go through looking for confirmation of one specific statement. A citation to single web page or page in a book or journal, on the other hand, makes it possible for the reader, or another editor, to quickly check the accuracy of that statement. A while ago, I briefly attempted to check the accuracy of a few cited facts in every article that came through FAC; I eventually couldn't keep up, but while I was at it I was able to correct a few factual errors in articles, despite knowing nothing about the subject, because of good citations. (I also found out that a startling number of citations did not point to anything that verified the article's statements, but that's a different issue.)
The problem is to balance the desire for this kind of verifiability with the desire not to clutter up the article excessively. It's convenient for me that this issue comes up now, because I was thinking about this last night while I was writing; the result can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arginusae. To summarize, I think it's possible to cite just about every statement in an article to a small page range in a specific source by using notes that say "Unless noted otherwise, all details given here regarding X topic can be found in Y source, pp.234-250", and, as several other people have noted, it's possible to show scholarly consensus by saying something like "The account given here is that preferred by modern scholars; see X Source, 123-140, Y source, 522-543, and Z source, 90-100". By getting slightly creative with footnotes in this way, it's possible to produce an article that's thoroughly cited without being misleading about the origins of its statements.
Now if anybody wants to take on an actually pointless MoS requirement, I'm currently signing up able-bodied individuals for my crusade against the proscription on starting section headers with the definite article...