"Daniel P. B. Smith" wrote
I sometimes think that at least some people who object
to citations
do so because what they really want is to _establish themselves as
authorities_ through social interaction with other page editors. That
is, they want their Wikipedian colleagues to recognize _them_ as
reliable sources, and agree that any fact inserted by
[[User:Pantomath]] does not need a citation because everyone agrees
that User:Pantomath knows everything.
That sort of thing is not the reason why I don't think that (to take a random sort of
mathematical fact) the centre of a group being a subgroup doesn't merit a reference. I
do think it would be clutter. I do think, also, that "if you know enough to ask the
question, you know enough to answer it". If you understand what is at issue here, you
can see that it is a reasonable statement with a quick proof. If not, looking at a book
will presumably not help that much.
Also, I have to say that where I come from, priorities are different. Statements with
undefined terms in are completely opaque. Therefore, getting pages up with definitions on
is the way to increase well-founded knowledge. And until people know what is being talked
about, they cannot possibly know whether they are on the right page, at all. This is a
crunch issue. The Web contains huge numbers of technical papers with the latest stuff.
What you want may be out there, but actually no one is polymathic enough to be able to
grok it all. We do a pretty good job here of making technical literature accessible, and
that access is more to do, in my view, with demystification of buzzwords, than by
fact-checking zealotry. I'm all for purging errors, but not for referencing the
bleeding obvious.
Charles
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