[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[SlimVirgin]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 18:17,  <wiki-list at 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=3191413
>>
>
> 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.