On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Kat Walsh wrote:

This seems like a reasonable approach... Actually, strike that, it seems like what we already should be doing, in theory -- isn't it already true that every fact must be sourceable? We (myself included) just aren't so good at enforcing it by catching questionable statements and trying to source them.

I would say yes, this is what we should be doing... but it is only in theory because it is so laborious to do right atm.

There's no simple visual/textual way to densely-source an article (though there have been various attempts); serious footnoting is unsupported in software and non-trivial to hack. And there's not yet a culture of footnoting / citing the way there is a culture of stub-sorting -- the style guidelines for referencing exists, but should be more popular.

Finally, there is currently no way to maintain information *about* references, nor to maintain a single best-citation for each work. Every author has to figure out the proper full cite for a work, and cannot simply find the other pages/articles which used the same work.

A layered suggestion:

Step 1 : Strongly promote the current recommended footnote system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes

Step 2 : Strongly encourage the use of proper full cites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages/Sources_of_articles...

Step 3 : Add software features making each of these easier : add localizable strings for each field-name for cites and footnotes; then add 'footnote' and 'cite' buttons to the edit toolbar; provide "footnote" markup that handles autonumbering; add a keyboard-shortcut for footnoting; add footnote- and citation-aware menu options to WP browser plugins.

Step 4 : Work on unifying "References"/ "Citations"/ "Sources"/ "Bibliography"/ "External link[s]"/ "Further reading" style at the end of each article.

Step 5 : Add separate 'references' pages for every article. These pages should include: the date the article was created; the date of the last non-minor edit; the list of users, ips, and flagged-bots that have edited the article; a list of sources and other references that had been added at some point to the article; even a clear list of metadata about the article (protection/pov/cleanup/quality- assessment status).

Step 6 : Add a namespace/project to store the best-known information about every source used on any project, including user comments and trackbacks to articles referencing each source. (Optionally: seed this project with OpenCat content.)

Step 6.5: Add a wikitext feature like "{{cite:ISBN 0518274822|pp 12-23}}" which would subst: in the details of that work in proper citation format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikicite

SJ