On Jul 19, 2006, at 3:54 PM, Guettarda wrote:
On 7/19/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
Scientific papers manage this by citing common
textbooks or well-known
survey-type monographs or articles, maybe even several of them to
emphasize the commonness of the knowledge; I don't think we can go
much wrong by following their example.
Some do, but that's bad form.
Generally papers like that are badly
written
papers by a grad student - the kind of papers which attribute
information to
the wrong source (the kind that say X say xxx, when in fact X cites Y
as
saying xxx). It looks sloppy and amateurish there, it looks equally
amateurish here.
I strongly disagree. While we certainly should not do partial
citations - if we cite someone else citing a third source, we should
list the full chain - we *should*, most of the time, cite "common
textbooks or well-known survey-type monographs or articles" over the
original sources they are based on - this goes along with being an
encyclopedia, a tertiary source. What the actual folks doing novel
research say is exactly what we should *not* be citing - that gets into
original research. It's the long-standing, uncontroversial material in
multiple textbooks that we should be including in Wikipedia, and we
should cite it from there. We are not writing scientific papers, and
we shouldn't blindly take their style guides as our own. Furthermore,
as for looking "amateurish", we *are* amateurs - remember - "anyone can
edit"? Looking amateurish is simply looking honest, in our case.
Jesse Weinstein