On Jul 19, 2006, at 3:54 PM, Guettarda wrote:
On 7/19/06, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Scientific papers manage this by citing common textbooks or well-known survey-type monographs or articles, maybe even several of them to emphasize the commonness of the knowledge; I don't think we can go much wrong by following their example.
Some do, but that's bad form. Generally papers like that are badly written papers by a grad student - the kind of papers which attribute information to the wrong source (the kind that say X say xxx, when in fact X cites Y as saying xxx). It looks sloppy and amateurish there, it looks equally amateurish here.
I strongly disagree. While we certainly should not do partial citations - if we cite someone else citing a third source, we should list the full chain - we *should*, most of the time, cite "common textbooks or well-known survey-type monographs or articles" over the original sources they are based on - this goes along with being an encyclopedia, a tertiary source. What the actual folks doing novel research say is exactly what we should *not* be citing - that gets into original research. It's the long-standing, uncontroversial material in multiple textbooks that we should be including in Wikipedia, and we should cite it from there. We are not writing scientific papers, and we shouldn't blindly take their style guides as our own. Furthermore, as for looking "amateurish", we *are* amateurs - remember - "anyone can edit"? Looking amateurish is simply looking honest, in our case.
Jesse Weinstein