dpbsmith@verizon.net writes:
I would really like to see more use of attributions, references, citations within Wikipedia. Traditional encyclopedias don't do very much of this, but I think this is a serious weakness on their part. The traditional encyclopedia simply speaks _ex cathedra_, and the only reason you have for believing it is that "they wouldn't print it if it weren't true." ... I remember being shocked in high school when I learned for the first time that an encyclopedia could not be referenced in a scholarly article because it didn't meet scholarly standards for attribution.
I agree; this is why I usually try to cite sources, articles, interviews, etc. This fits in well with our NPOV policy. Person X says Y about subject Z.
See, for example, our article on [[The Bible and history]], which has a fairly extensive bibliography. More Wikipedia articles need to refer readers to primary sources.
I don't know why print encyclopedias don't choose to reference their sources. Presumably it's limited space, and/or a desire not to clutter up the article with
footnotes.
I am sure that this is precisely the problem they faced. However, Wikipedia has no limitations on text; we have room to document every important point in every article. We don not even need to clutter up the main article to do so; if footnotes or references ever get too long, we can add them as a footnotes page, such as (proposed):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_footnotes or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History (footnotes) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History/footnotes
Robert (RK)
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