There was a discussion a while back about introducing new citation markup as part of the Wikicite project. Yet today there is still no specialized mark-up for defining citations within an article. At best there is the footnote feature, which replicates the typographic conventions of citation in the print world down to its fundamental limitations, such as its inability to clearly delimit its own scope (i.e. which parts of the text make use of a particular citation). This problem is compounded in a wiki content-creation environment; an editor can- in complete good faith- insert new content in the middle of a footnote'd sentence that hides the fact the new material is completely uncited.
My proposal back then was to use an enclosing citation markup, something like:
[[cite:ISBN:000000001X:p215|"cited text"|"paraphrase"]]
Though this was meant as a stepping-stone to other projects, in the near-term it can be used to catch "citation holes" within an article by having the renderer flag those areas of text that are unsourced. Not only will this warn readers which sections of an article are unreliable, it will also direct editors to those parts of it most in need of their attention. Here is my mock-up of the idea:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:WikiTextrose_article_citations.png
Outside of a few exceptions, an article should ideally have a citation for EVERY factual assertion. Walter's example of the Soi article actually only confirms my point. There may be no books on the subject, but there are probably lots of other "texts", such as maps, guide books, civil engineering manuals, etc.
- Almost all sois also have a name.
I first wanted to be bolder as I have never seen a soi that doesn't also have a name. But I decided to be a bit less sure about it
By encouraging editors to prove every assertion with evidence, we confront one of the most prevalent, if lesser, evils on Wikipedia (which I've certainly been guilty of before)- the resort to "obvious" off-the-top-of-the-head knowledge which may not quite be true, is probably remembered less than accurately, and so must be couched in many qualifiers to hide these two facts.
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