On 07/04/2008, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
But sometimes I suspect it's just newbies who don't really getting the sourcing reasons/methods - or I'm an old-timer who's fallen behind the culture.
A lot of the problem is that people haven't been taught proper sourcing - Phil's ire is largely that beating this into the heads of college students is a large part of what he does at work every day. And it takes three or four years to get them sourcing fully but not ridiculously.
So our problem is how to give casual editors training wheels for sourcing, referencing and verifiability, without said training wheels being taken to reductio ad absurdum by the querulous. And you know that Wikipedia has only the finest querulousness known to mankind.
(This is a summary of what's happening right now on WT:V and WT:NOR.)
The training wheels approach - primitive referencing of every fact down to the (stereotypical) colour of the sky or shape of the earth - is a good *start*. But it can get a bit silly pretty quickly.
- d.