On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 18:17, <wiki-list(a)phizz.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 04/10/2010 19:43, geni wrote:
The Wikipedia that went from nothing to top ten site was never built
on verifiable knowledge. It was built on what people happened to have
in their heads. The whole citation thing outside the more
controversial areas came later. Don't believe me? This was a featured
article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murder_of_James_Bulger&oldid=…
Have you looked at the current version of that page? Every sentence has
at least one ref, it looks like a spider has fallen into an ink well and
then run backwards and forwards across the page.
It's very distracting, and completely unnecessary. There are ways of
bundling citations into one footnote at the end of each paragraph,
while still making clear which citation supports which words. But it's
an uphill struggle to get anyone to do this. Editors feel the more
clickable links they have, the safer the material is, with some
justification, because it's very common for others to arrive to remove
anything they can't find the reference for within a few seconds.