On 04/10/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Sorry for top posting, but I just wanted to say that I agree with Daniel completely here. Sources are critical.
Agreed, But should we be sourcing the *wikipedia*, or should we be sourcing the *article*?
Because that's not the same thing.
In my view, sourcing each article like it is a standalone entity is a throwback to the dead-tree encyclopedia where cross-referencing is very painful indeed. With hypertexting it is quite possible to construct an article that doesn't suffer for lack of references at all (or very few)- because each paragraph summarises the position of other article(s) and links to them. The linked-to articles contain numerous references supporting the summary and their own article.
And this style of article is very useful for people to learn a new area- the summary article is generally a lot easier to read than one with the detailed, referenced articles. But right now, a readable summary article cannot reach FA, because it doesn't have enough references!!!
Whilst you *can* duplicate information around the wikipedia; that makes the wikipedia more brittle- for example when something changes, you would find it hard to track down all the changes that need to be made.
So the basic unit of a hypertext encyclopedia is not the article, it's the encyclopedia. In a hypertext entity like the wikipedia, I think we need to source the *wikipedia*, not the article.
--Jimbo