On 10/08/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
footnotes could be cleaned up and merged together, though - there's no reason to cite a dozen news stories saying the same thing...
Yes and no. If they're all AAP or Reuters-derived, then no. Other times I like to provide links to *every single* source, if there aren't ridiculously many of them.
The problem is... well, every general news story about this lists, say, six citable facts (number of arrests, hypothesis of number of planes, Reid quote, flight cancellations, type of explosive) out of a dozen things that we need to cite; it's just they don't all say the same six. And when someone says "we need a cite for "up to ten aircraft", that gets cited from the news story you're reading, which might not be one of the news stories already used as a source which says that.
I think at one point we had two seperate sources for the same quote, two others for a single figure, because it got listed in two parts of the article. That sort of thing.
One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but there's no need to cite eight instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and rationalise some of the sources.