On 3/21/07, wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
From: "John Lee" johnleemk@gmail.com
What's the point of that? It would be better to wait until you've found the sources before you start writing...
Citing sources should be easy because they should be the actual source of the information, which you will already know since it's whatever you just finished reading.
This strikes me as a rather inconvenient process.
It's known as "work." Writing is work. Writing an encyclopedia is work.
What constitutes work? You're speaking in truisms - I'm sure we all agree writing an encyclopaedia is work, but what would you define as constituting work? Demanding that I have a book open and in front of me when all the requisite information for a stub is in my head (this used to be especially common when we didn't have anything close to a million articles, and I'm sure it's still common for many editors from areas subject to systemic bias) strikes me as demanding form over function. Should I wear a suit and tie when I edit?
Perhaps other people work
at things differently, but I rarely directly refer to sources when
starting
an article unless I know little about it. The only exception is when I
have
sources and am not sure what articles could use them, in which case I
hunt
through the book/whatever for things I could write about. Otherwise,
when I
want to write about something in general (especially when it's on
impulse,
normally after "what? this is a redlink?"), it's often inefficient and frustrating to hunt down a source.
Why is it any more "convenient" to do this in the main article space than in your own user space?
Wait, are we talking about crappy, half-written drafts, or decent stubs? An article can be a draft and a stub (i.e. the editor intends to return to the article to flesh it out later), or it can be a "finished" stub (although this seems a bit oxymoronic), or it can just be a draft. The latter is clearly unsuited for article space, but the former two are perfectly fine. A stub-quality article is better off in article space than in userspace; a half-written draft stub is not.
Call me an eventualist,
I don't call this eventualism.
I call this rehearsing in front of the audience.
I call this running out into the street naked and telling the policeman "But I was just about to put my clothes on."
If you have a problem with the fundamental premise of Wikipedia that we write an encyclopaedia while our readers are browsing it, maybe this isn't the right project for you. :-p
Johnleemk