On 3/20/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I can recall on several occasions starting a quick stub article on something based off of general information I already knew and then later on came back with more detailed information and sources after I'd researched a little. I guess I've just been lucky so far that CSD fundamentalists haven't caught me at it.
What's the point of that? It would be better to wait until you've found the sources before you start writing, otherwise you may be adding incorrect information.
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. 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.
Call me an eventualist, but from experience, things work out fine in the end. The article doesn't stay like that forever - it improves.
(Disclaimer: I don't exactly start articles very often these days without sources, mainly because it's all but impossible for me to find a redlink where I have the requisite general information for a stub stuffed in my head, so my "experience" is actually a couple of years old. If this is an instance of old fartery, feel free to disregard this email.)
Johnleemk