In addition, in my view, adding specific citations can be misleading for widely believed/understood/known facts. For instance, if I write that "Anthony Newcomb says that Alfonso Fontanelli was one of the foremost madrigalists of 16th century Italy", or in other words "Alfonso Fontanelli was one of the foremonst madrigalists of 16th century Italy<ref>Newcomb blah blah</ref>", that implies that other major scholars of music in 16th century Italy such as Alfred Einstein, do /not/ believe that Fontanelli was a foremost madrigalist, which isn't the case. It's widely thought that he was. It shouldn't need an inline citation, because all the major sources agree on it. But since practically no-one on-wiki is an expert on 16th century Italian music, they insist on inline citations, so that someone could potentially go "check" that "fact". I think inline citations can be very important, but I don't think every single factual assertion in an article should have to have an inline citation, especially when an article really is simply echoing accepted non-controversial scholarship, such as, for instance, [[Dido and Aeneas]], which just received a GA review request for inline citations. It's getting ridiculous. [[User:Makemi]] On 9/29/06, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com &lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mak wrote: First of all, if 'all the major sources agree on' a particular fact, then where is the problem in citing one of them? Good Articles need to demonstrate compliance with the Manual of Style at the very least (if not all the other various guidelines on different issue) - and if people had followed [[WP:CITE]] in the first place then there wouldn't be the problem with the GA review, would there? It's not as if it is a brand new guideline that may be under dispute or unknown - WP:CITE has been around since 2002, if some editors decided to ignore it then it's no surprise that others objected to their work being elevated to GA status. Cynical

Mak wrote: That seems reasonable to me, and I think this is a major problem with the current wikilawyering approach to footnotes (which bears resemblance to the footnote-heavy style of pedantic academic writing that's mostly fallen out of fashion in academia itself). Footnotes make sense when a specific claim should be attributed to a specific source, especially if it's controversial. Even some non-controversial claims could use footnote citations, such as dating an ancient battle to a specific date (cite a generally-accepted timeline). When I'm writing articles that contain no unusual or controversial claims, though, it seems silly to keep using footnotes after every sentence, so I just place the reference in the "References" section. Interestingly, this is standard style in most of the technical articles, maybe because the pedants know not to poke their head in there. Most good mathematics articles contain a footnote-free exposition of the subject, with some references at the end, and footnotes only to point out where authorities disagree, where there's a significant minority view, or to point to particularly notable proofs. -Mark

On 9/29/06, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com &lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: The other consideration for standard textbook references is that there may be a dozen or more references to a single textbook (or indeed, the article could be based entirely on one or two textbooks), which is cumbersome to cite in-line. While using the reference name shortcut shortens things up, it's still very tedious (and very distracting) if about every other sentence has a citation link and every equation present has a citation link. Carl

On 29/09/06, Nathaniel Sheetz &lt;preparing(a)psu.edu&gt; wrote: A separate ==Sources== section can be good for this. Verifiability is important and in most cases, references are *good* - the reader has no idea who the authors are, so only has the text and maybe what references are clickable to figure out the text's value from. Do please continue :-) - d.

On 9/29/06, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: What citations do is massively simplify the process of verifying any given statement. If a statement is not specifically cited, it could, for all the reader knows, come from anywhere in any of the books used as references, which, on most articles, would be a large amount of material to go through looking for confirmation of one specific statement. A citation to single web page or page in a book or journal, on the other hand, makes it possible for the reader, or another editor, to quickly check the accuracy of that statement. A while ago, I briefly attempted to check the accuracy of a few cited facts in every article that came through FAC; I eventually couldn't keep up, but while I was at it I was able to correct a few factual errors in articles, despite knowing nothing about the subject, because of good citations. (I also found out that a startling number of citations did not point to anything that verified the article's statements, but that's a different issue.) The problem is to balance the desire for this kind of verifiability with the desire not to clutter up the article excessively. It's convenient for me that this issue comes up now, because I was thinking about this last night while I was writing; the result can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arginusae. To summarize, I think it's possible to cite just about every statement in an article to a small page range in a specific source by using notes that say "Unless noted otherwise, all details given here regarding X topic can be found in Y source, pp.234-250", and, as several other people have noted, it's possible to show scholarly consensus by saying something like "The account given here is that preferred by modern scholars; see X Source, 123-140, Y source, 522-543, and Z source, 90-100". By getting slightly creative with footnotes in this way, it's possible to produce an article that's thoroughly cited without being misleading about the origins of its statements. Now if anybody wants to take on an actually pointless MoS requirement, I'm currently signing up able-bodied individuals for my crusade against the proscription on starting section headers with the definite article...

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mak wrote: Would it be all that hard to provide a specific page reference as a footnote. e.g. (hypothetical example) <ref>See, for example, J. Doe /Origins of Somethingorother/ p.29, J. Bloggs /Somethingorother explained p.60</ref>.</ref>? And there is no need to cite a source after every fact - after every paragraph or subtopic would be fine. But no citations is unlikely to result in a successful GA review, at least unless/until the proposed changes to the GA criteria are accepted. Cynical David Russell

On Sep 29, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Jake Waskett wrote: Go write the code. -Phil

Oh, and on a slightly different note, when I made an experiment of extremely close citations on [[Concerto delle donne]] (now an FA), when other users, even experienced ones with advanced degrees, edited the text, they would move information without moving the correct citation. The only resolution to that I could find was to attach references to single sentences, which as you can see results in an article with a list of citations practically as long as the article. And this is on a fairly non-controversial topic. Makemi

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Mak wrote: Fine - since the list of citations appears at the end of the article, nobody has to read it if they don't want to. Cynical

Phil Sandifer wrote: You're being needlessly brusque, and also misleading. Do you mean that only people who have the time and ability to actually do Wikimedia programming get to decide what Wikipedia looks like and how it functions? If I were to sit down and write the code to add a preference allowing users to add blink tags to all wikilinks, that'd go in without any discussion by non-coders? I wouldn't think so. Programmers with any sense of professionalism should pay at least a little attention to what the users of their software say about it. That all said, I just checked the source HTML and see that references have 'class="reference"' in the <sup> tags. I suspect a very simple stylesheet change is all that's needed, not something that would trouble programmers.

Kirill Lokshin wrote: If you just use .reference { display: none; } Then the footnotes remain visible at the bottom of the article but the superscripted links within the article itself vanish. It's still not quite perfect since the footnotes' backlinks remain but no longer work, however it's getting pretty close to what I expect a preference like the one proposed would do.

On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 19:37 -0600, Bryan Derksen wrote: That would be great, if it worked, but as others have pointed out, it might not be achievable. Personally, I'm not familiar with the Wiki code, and I don't intend to dive in and break it, but my suggestion needn't be too difficult to implement. I'd be grateful if someone would forward this to the appropriate list where developers can read it. 1. Add a 'reference_level' field to the users table. 2. When generating a page, read this field at the same time as performing the new messages check. If the user is not logged in, set a sensible default. 3. When generating the HTML for a <ref>, check that the reference_level permits it. A straightforward implementation would have level 0 = no refs, 1 = show refs. For extra credit, allow 'important' references to be specified, and allow the levels: 0 = none, 1 = important only, 2 = all refs. 4. Add appropriate user preferences. Jake

Nyenyec N wrote: Excellent. Where do I sign up? -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP