Anthony DiPierro wrote:
For a strawman, let's take [[Myhill–Nerode theorem]]. I assume you didn't start that article from memory. You did use a source, right? Now given a few minutes of searching on Google print I could probably come up with a source to verify that information, but at the same time you could much more easily simply list the book you actually used.
I did in fact start it from memory, since it's a standard result that anyone who's taken a theory of computation class would be familiar with. I could retroactively give a source, but any theory of computation book will have it. The interested reader would be best served by consulting whatever book they find easiest to access, rather than having me pick one of them and tell them to use that specific one. (Of course, in things that are only in a few books, or treated significantly differently by different authors, giving the specific reference makes more sense.)
-Mark