charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Laura Scudder" wrote
I'm am very pro-citation when it helps us build a better encyclopedia, but I'm anti-"let's footnote everything even though it appears in any textbook on the subject and is totally uncontroversial, just to satisfy a process decision".
I think it's a horrid idea to have any policy on this which would allow people to spam us with inline references, for example, to their version of The Great American Calculus Text.
Those books _all_ follow the pattern set down by Thomas of MIT in the 1950s. They are alike as two peas in a pod. They are written for money, and contain material that has all been known for 150 years.
/me thinks we might need a "list of reputable textbooks which can be used as inline references" somewhere in Wikipedia: space...