[WikiEN-l] New policy proposal

[Geoff Burling]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Bryan Derksen wrote:

> At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
> >What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying
> >to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax
> >implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing
> >fancy reference-indexing things.)
>
> Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature request for
> a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding [[Note:blah blah
> blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn into a superscripted
> number linking to an anchor for the text "blah blah blah" down at the very
> bottom of the page. Something like that could be suitable for references
> too, though it wouldn't be nice for making multiple references to the same
> source scattered throughout an article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]]
> markup that automatically combines identical "blah blah" text into the same
> reference at the bottom?
>
The following won't solve the entire problem, but it's an easy fix to part
of the problem of providing references.

I've recently noticed, while updating a few of the articles that offer
statistics on nations, that for the most part they lack any notice that the
information was taken from the CIA Factbook. Adding a reference to those
articles would not only explain where these figures came from, but in the
all-too-frequent case of outdated information allow a user to find the
latest numbers.

The only reason I can see that we wouldn't want to provide proper attribution
is that contributors don't want to acknowledge a connection to the US CIA,
which, to put it mildly, has a remarkably tarnished reputation.

So to solve this problem in attribution, I wrote {{template:CIAfb}}, to be
added to the bottom of the relevant articles. Perhaps some folks could
join me in adding this template to more articles where appropriate?

Geoff