On Feb 9, 2005, at 11:17 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
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
Which is why the wikicite proposal includes the incorporation of footnoting code which is being worked on. One way to cut down on citation cruft, a current problem, is to integrate footnoting more directly into wiki writing. This way people will see which citations were directly used.