Three minor clarifications... first, our article on radioactivity is a redirect to "Radioactive decay,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay
and that's the article to which my comments apply.
Second, the Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition's article on "Radioactivity" is considerably _longer_ than ours, so an equivalent citation density in ours would be less than fifty-four inline citations... I haven't got time to do the math right now but since our article has zero citations the ratio is still the same.
Third, no, just for the record, I don't think E. Ru.'s 1911 article would be the best article to rely on, as of 2006, as one's sole source of information on radioactivity, a few things having been learned in the last century....
I would strongly argue that we need far, far *less* references than the Encyclopedia Britannica due to the hypertext linking in the wikipedia.
What hypertexting means is that the references tend to get pushed down to daughter nodes on particular topics, and you end up with summary articles with few references that internally refer to other articles. In Brittanica I bet that the references are duplicated throughout the Encyclopedia giving an artificially high reference count.
We need to get away from encyclopedia envy and do the right things for the wikipedia.
On 04/10/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
I would strongly argue that we need far, far *less* references than the Encyclopedia Britannica due to the hypertext linking in the wikipedia. What hypertexting means is that the references tend to get pushed down to daughter nodes on particular topics, and you end up with summary articles with few references that internally refer to other articles. In Brittanica I bet that the references are duplicated throughout the Encyclopedia giving an artificially high reference count. We need to get away from encyclopedia envy and do the right things for the wikipedia.
Hmmmm. Articles get refactored a *lot* around here, though. I've put the same reference in several articles as needed on the principle that more good references are better than not enough, and we can't presume an article will be viewed as part of Wikipedia. I've turned [[Xenu]] into a handbill, for instance, and been very glad the references were *right there*. Mind you, that article needs to be referenced to the hilt for the sheer "wtf" factor, but anyway.
Semi-tangentially, I'm wondering how to properly reference [[Fork (software)]]. It's at about a 2003 or 2004 level of quality - "everyone in the field knows this stuff" - but needs more for 2006.
- d.
On 04/10/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hmmmm. Articles get refactored a *lot* around here, though.
Right. So consider a paragraph including a reference that gets cut out and turned into its own article. And you put a very brief summary sentence where the paragraph used to go, and you link to the new article.
Problem: the number of references in the original article just went down by 1. Are you seriously saying that we really need to come up with another reference for the sentence? The actual reference is still there in the new article and it is surrounded by text that it justifies.
If you keep doing that repeatedly, you end up with a completely unreferenced orginal article. But the amount of references in the wikipedia has not gone down.
That's why I consider that a summary page in many cases needs few if any references.
Yes, I know the policy. The policy is wrong in this kind of case. A very well-linked article needs very few external references. I think the FA process needs to count credit for internal references as if they were external references; not at 1:1, but some number:1; 10:1 internal to external or something.
At the moment it's too all or nothing: ALL ARTICLES NEED REFERENCES. INTERNAL LINKS DO NOT COUNT! Um. So refactoring is a bad thing then? I DON'T CARE. EXTERMINATE- EXTERMINATE!
:-)
- d.
On 10/3/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
Right. So consider a paragraph including a reference that gets cut out and turned into its own article. And you put a very brief summary sentence where the paragraph used to go, and you link to the new article.
Problem: the number of references in the original article just went down by 1. Are you seriously saying that we really need to come up with another reference for the sentence? The actual reference is still there in the new article and it is surrounded by text that it justifies.
Well, is the statement (if not necessarily the original text) that was referenced still present in the summary article or not? If it is, just leave the reference in place (in addition to copying it to the new article, of course); there's nothing wrong, per se, with duplicated references.
You can, of course, do a number of other things:
1. Add a footnote that says something like "For sources corroborating this point, see [[New article]]." It's not necessarily the cleanest form of citation, but at least it gives readers and future editors an explicit trail to the references. 2. Condense the citations. For example, if you replace a paragraph with five citations with a one-sentence summary, cite all five sources for it.
David Gerard wrote:
On 04/10/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
I would strongly argue that we need far, far *less* references than the Encyclopedia Britannica due to the hypertext linking in the wikipedia. What hypertexting means is that the references tend to get pushed down to daughter nodes on particular topics, and you end up with summary articles with few references that internally refer to other articles. In Brittanica I bet that the references are duplicated throughout the Encyclopedia giving an artificially high reference count. We need to get away from encyclopedia envy and do the right things for the wikipedia.
Hmmmm. Articles get refactored a *lot* around here, though. I've put the same reference in several articles as needed on the principle that more good references are better than not enough, and we can't presume an article will be viewed as part of Wikipedia. I've turned [[Xenu]] into a handbill, for instance, and been very glad the references were *right there*. Mind you, that article needs to be referenced to the hilt for the sheer "wtf" factor, but anyway.
Semi-tangentially, I'm wondering how to properly reference [[Fork (software)]]. It's at about a 2003 or 2004 level of quality - "everyone in the field knows this stuff" - but needs more for 2006.
Sadly, I think we may be ahead of the dead-tree world on stuff like this and references are hard to come by. Online references would probably reference us in return and we end up being self-referential...