[WikiEN-l] A busy article!

[Andrew Gray]

On 10/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/10/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> > footnotes could be cleaned up and merged together, though - there's no
> > reason to cite a dozen news stories saying the same thing...
>
> Yes and no. If they're all AAP or Reuters-derived, then no. Other
> times I like to provide links to *every single* source, if there
> aren't ridiculously many of them.

The problem is... well, every general news story about this lists,
say, six citable facts (number of arrests, hypothesis of number of
planes, Reid quote, flight cancellations, type of explosive) out of a
dozen things that we need to cite; it's just they don't all say the
same six. And when someone says "we need a cite for "up to ten
aircraft", that gets cited from the news story you're reading, which
might not be one of the news stories already used as a source which
says that.

I think at one point we had two seperate sources for the same quote,
two others for a single figure, because it got listed in two parts of
the article. That sort of thing.

One source alone is a bad idea, yes, but there's no need to cite eight
instead of two. I'll have a hack at the article tomorrow and
rationalise some of the sources.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk