For all concerned: I used the Flat Earth Society as an extreme example -- not as a kind of important precedent. The real issue is, as others have said, that NOR is a for the most part a guideline and not an absolute rule, to apply to anything which hasn't been checked over by a physicist or physician.
SV
--- Skyring skyring@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/26/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Without such a mechanism, we could end up with
more footnotes than there
are sentences in many articles. Just looking at
[[en:Paris]] for the
moment, this is the first paragraph:
"Paris is the capital city of France, as well as
the capital of the
Ile-de-France region, whose territory encompasses
Paris and its
suburbs. The city of Paris proper is also a
departement, called Paris
departement (French: departement de Paris)."
These are facts that might be worth getting
citations for:
[1] Paris is the capital city of France. [2] Paris is the capital of the Ile-de-France
region.
[3] The Ile-de-France region's territory
encompasses Paris and its suburbs.
[4] The city of Paris proper is also a
departement, called Paris
departement.
Presumably citations for these can be found in
French law, and would be
useful to have somewhere---someone might
conceivably actually want to
know exactly where it is specified officially that
Paris is the capital
city of France. But I'm not sure we'd want to
present readers with a
barrage of footnotes for all these facts that they
might take as fairly
obvious---by the time you got the end of the
article we might be on
footnote #200.
The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of France so far have kept their activities secret.
If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite.
-- Peter in Canberra _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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