On 3/21/07, wikipedia2006(a)dpbsmith.com <wikipedia2006(a)dpbsmith.com> wrote:
From: "John Lee"
<johnleemk(a)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