Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
I agree completely. Lack of citation and traceability is IMHO a big glaring deficiency in traditional encyclopedias, and it's one that should be remediable in a hypertext encyclopedia. tter Wiki-apparatus for the purpose).
But this seems to assume that the citations will all be to websites, which isn't likely to be the case--most respected, reliable information is still not available online. So citations of that sort will have to be to books or journal articles, which in many cases won't be accessible through hypertext.
What I meant was that I don't understand why citations--to books, websites, "personal communications," what have you--aren't used more often. I don't personally care so much what the format is, so long as they're _there_. By "hypertext," I just meant that it provides possibilities for presenting the text in a way that doesn't interrupt flow for the casual reader, while still allowing the references to be visible to the reader who wants to see the citations.
The way it was done in "Seabiscuit," and which is becoming very popular for nonscholarly nonfiction, is a technique for which I don't know a name, which I will call "invisible endnotes." That is, there are no markers in the text at all, but at the end of the book the citations are referenced by chapter number, page number, and starting phrase of the sentence. This seems to me to be close to ideal--but it wouldn't work very well in Wikipedia, at least not without some technical apparatus that isn't in place yet, because Wikipedia articles don't have numbered pages and are subject to constant editing.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@world.std.com alternate: dpbsmith@alum.mit.edu "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/