You are confusing "citation" with "see also" or "other references".
I know I'm right because Wiktionary agrees: 2 The act of citing a passage from a book, or from another person, in his own words; also, the passage or words quoted; quotation. 3 Enumeration; mention; as, a citation of facts.
If I write an article on a subject, it shows bad academic scruples for me to cite sources I didn't use. Likewise, it is bad for Wikipedia for somebody to add a cite to an article that didn't go into the writing of the text, although that's not nessecarily true if it was used to confirm a fact as opposed to it just being a good book on the subject.
For example, the English version of the article Trisceli recently copied the cites line-for-line from the independently-written (ie, not translated) Sicilian article, without adding text. This is poor.
Mark
On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 15:59:24 -0800, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
I think a very important issue here is whether to add cites to articles that we don't know what sources were used.
If I wrote the entire text of [[Japanese language]] (which I didn't, this is just an example), without a cite, it would be a very horrible thing in my mind if somebody added a cite for a book I'd never even heard of. It's simply not accurate, and in some cases the book may not even be a good resource.
Whenever somebody adds a random cite to an article written mostly or entirely by me, I remove it unless I actually DID use that source. It's very irritating to have people doing that, almost like bees, who while they make honey also tend to annoy people.
That's not nice. It suggests that you have taken personal ownership of the article. When somebody adds a citation, one should at least presume that the person acted in good faith, and that he felt that the source supported some of the things said in the article. How can you possibly tell whether a book is a good resource if you've never heard of it? You have no basis for determining that the cite is "random".
It's not as if he were referring to a source with a known biased political point of view.
Ec