[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR

[Sarah]

On 12/18/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "Thomas Dalton" wrote
>
> >We don't need to go through and put "So-and-so says"
> > at the beginning of every sentence in the encyclopaedia.
>
> I basically agree. The referencing junkies will push us back a notch, to where we have the 'materials for an encylopedia', not the encyclopedia itself. Or perhaps that has always been where we are. In which case we are delaying the day when we have 'finished' articles.
>
> Is this good or bad? Well, the Internet is full of argumentative people, and many topics are contentious. The way to deal with those people and topics may well be to summarise controversies. But we really do need, even there, a degree of concision; otherwise we are going merely to recreate the scholasticism of past centuries. And then, in fact, people want to look up facts in encyclopedias. They don't always want quibbles.
>
Charles, I disagree. I think people appreciate knowing who said what,
and why that person's views are important enough to include. Why
should they trust anonymous editors who declare without sources what
"the facts" are?

I agree that articles that simply list sources and what they say are
tiresome, but that's a question of the writing. Written properly,
well-sourced articles are more readable and useful to readers than
poorly sourced ones.

Sarah