"Laura Scudder" wrote
I'm am very pro-citation when it helps us build a better encyclopedia, but I'm anti-"let's footnote everything even though it appears in any textbook on the subject and is totally uncontroversial, just to satisfy a process decision".
I think it's a horrid idea to have any policy on this which would allow people to spam us with inline references, for example, to their version of The Great American Calculus Text.
Those books _all_ follow the pattern set down by Thomas of MIT in the 1950s. They are alike as two peas in a pod. They are written for money, and contain material that has all been known for 150 years.
Charlee
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charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Laura Scudder" wrote
I'm am very pro-citation when it helps us build a better encyclopedia, but I'm anti-"let's footnote everything even though it appears in any textbook on the subject and is totally uncontroversial, just to satisfy a process decision".
I think it's a horrid idea to have any policy on this which would allow people to spam us with inline references, for example, to their version of The Great American Calculus Text.
Those books _all_ follow the pattern set down by Thomas of MIT in the 1950s. They are alike as two peas in a pod. They are written for money, and contain material that has all been known for 150 years.
/me thinks we might need a "list of reputable textbooks which can be used as inline references" somewhere in Wikipedia: space...
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
/me thinks we might need a "list of reputable textbooks which can be used as inline references" somewhere in Wikipedia: space...
I think such a list would be as useless as a "list of copyrighted images which can be fairly used in Wikipedia articles." Which articles are they reputable sources for, and for which facts within those articles?
Let's say we had a textbook that's been written by creationists as a tool to undermine the teaching of evolution in high school biology, and everyone knows it - it's a clumsy hack job. Obviously isn't a "reputable source" for information about evolution. But it's a great source to cite in [[Creationism]], or even in [[Evolution#Controversy]] (if such a section exists). So how does it get listed? I think it'd be much easier to just let people cite whatever they want and then if other editors have a problem with it they can work it out on the relevant article's talk page on a case-by-case basis.