[WikiEN-l] insist on sources

[Tony Sidaway]

On 7/19/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me give you an example. If I were writing an article on a drug and
> I included the sentence "tyrosine is an amino acid", I would be
> expressing a relation that is learnt in secondary education. It being
> an amino acid is the first thing anyone would learn about tyrosine. Is
> this reference worthy?

No.  Referencing is good, but the current campaign to reference
everything (which comes from good motives) has led to the removal of
common knowledge from articles simply because "if we leave this in
then someone will come and put a bit of made-up nonsense in and claim
he doesn't have to reference it."

The solution to this is obvious: don't remove something you *know* to
be true.  If it really isn't common knowledge, somebody will.

When it comes to biographical articles, however, and particularly
those about living people, everything should be referenced.

I only wish we had something better than the revoltingly ugly
reference mechanism we have at present ("ref" tags), which required
the editor to place all kinds of obstrusive metadata into the body of
an article when he really wants it to appear at the end.  This makes
the text of the article very difficult to read and edit.