[WikiEN-l] Re: Example vs. Original research

[Charles Matthews]

Delirium

> The sort of paper that buries its reader in gratuitous and 
> only-tangentially-relevant equations and data tables as a substitute for 
> actually making a good argument is sadly altogether too common.  Most do 
> get caught by peer review (at least in good publications and conferences), 
> but there are still a fair number that slip through...

Bad papers get published - no surprise there.  It would be a surprise if 
they rose high up the citation statistics.  The comparison with political 
rhetoric breaks down right there, doesn't it?  Simplistic political stuff 
generally gets far more attention than carefully-crafted leaders and columns 
in the quality press.

> But regardless, *we* don't want to do that.  A few of the articles that 
> get too citation-happy do seem to do this sometimes... when every single 
> sentence ends with an external link (half of them broken, since the web is 
> mostly ephemeral), and the writing style is "a bunch of gratuitous facts 
> are asserted with no coherent explanation", something is wrong...

Could be the people who use 'quote your sources' as a way to win arguments, 
rather than improve the encyclopedia?

Charles