I'd distinguish between the sources used to establish the notability of the article and those for the verifiablity of details.
The sort of source which helps the most in defending the notability of the article is a book review or product review, and the better known the source for this, the better, but for perfectly good subjects, only non-standard sources are available.
For details, I agree that some of the articles are excessive. This is particularly the case in the sciences, where some of the articles are footnoted as densely as for a scholarly review--which is not WP. But if a fact is challenged it does have to be documented.
I think trying to get FA status (etc) under the current practices not worth the trouble. If you want it, you do have to follow the fashion. If they are going to be on the main page, an illustration is not unreasonable. Otherwise, the answer to someone who asks for a illustration is obvious: go put one in yourself.
I'm more concerned with the substance of articles.
On 1/9/07, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
For individual articles, the way to do it is to put in a clearly sufficient number of citations. from printed works. (accompanied by English translations if necessary). I've found that specific citations from peer-reviewed journals do help, if they are at all pertinent. So do Ph.d. theses and even Masters theses.
This is the current vogue on Wikipedia: everything should have a gazillion inline citations, and conversely, anything that does not have a gazillion inline citations is bad. This is how very good articles that used to have FA status or ability one or two years ago are now considered "horrible" according to the current fashion. Now, what this vogue leads to:
- We have very good articles (in terms of content and accuracy) on which
nobody who knows the topic objects anything is wrong, but which are considered bad because not every statement that any person who have heard about the issue would agree with has a source.
- We have horrific articles, but in which everything is "sourced".
Anything goes: trivia, mention of the subject appearing in a Seinfeld episode, quotations from newspapers on fields they are incompetent about (such as science), etc.
Formally speaking, they sound nice, and they please the crowd who thinks that what's important in life is sticking to formal rules and earn good marks for it. However, those articles really are a shame.
In addition, this kind of "sourcing" has a strong bias towards Internet sources (Internet-accessible newspapers, sites, etc.), which, on the other hand, tend to be very inadequate on many topics. I remember recently reading an evaluation of an article on fr: (I think, 'Women in Iran') by a known specialist. What she said:
- A lot of relevant literature on the issue is ignored.
- On the other hand, Internet sources, often not much good, are
overrepresented.
- There are numerous errors.
But this article nearly made it to "featured" status, because, formally speaking, it had everything! Many citations, photos etc.
To me, the rules that we create, as all rule systems, have this perverse effect that people work more to fulfill the rules ("we should have a photo" even on abstract topics, "we should have a gazillion citations" even if they are low quality) than to fulfill the goal (having good articles that people knowing the subject would agree reflect the various notable points of view in an unbiased way).
-- DM
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