[WikiEN-l] note David Gerard's just placed on [[WT:AFD]]

[Philip Welch]

>> Properly done each fact (or set of facts) will point somehow to  
>> the source, including the page in the source.
>
> How? And how will the article still be readable? And what is a  
> fact? And what use is the page number
> when there are loads of editions of a source?
>
> No encyclopaedia is written like this.

I agree that it would be difficult to achieve this, and far too labor- 
intensive. (This was, from what I've heard, one of the major flaws of  
Nupedia.) From today's featured article:

Until the mid-19th century, the area around Kalimpong was ruled  
intermittently by the Sikkimese and Bhutanese kingdoms. Present-day  
Kalimpong is believed to have once been the forward position of the  
Bhutanese in the 18th century, overlooking the Teesta Valley. The  
area was sparsely populated by the indigenous Lepcha community and  
migrant Bhutia and Limbu tribes. After the Anglo-Bhutan War in 1864,  
the Treaty of Sinchula (1865) was signed in which Bhutanese held  
territory east of the Teesta River was ceded to the British East  
India Company. At that time, Kalimpong was a hamlet, with only four  
families known to reside there. The first recorded mention of the  
town was a fleeting reference made that year by Ashley Eden, a  
government official with the Bengal Civil Service.

I count nine statements of fact there, and no specific citations or  
sources. Do we really want to have, at minimum, one footnote per  
sentence? Unless MediaWiki gets fixed fast and we can have, say,  
implied metadata for any piece of text in an article, it would be  
unreadable.

That said, it would be nice to eventually have such a system.

-- 
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch