[WikiEN-l] Citationgate: expertise and verifiability

[Carl Peterson]

On 9/29/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
wrote:
>
> "Peter Jacobi" <peter_jacobi at gmx.net>
>
> > In the unlikely case anyone interested has missed it: There
> > are some troubles re mandatory in-line citing and science
> > articles.
> >
> > It all started with a warning put at large number of "good
> > articles" that they will be delisted soon for lack of
> > in-line cites. This immediately got the response, that standard
> > textbooks facts are not and should not be in-line cited, the
> > references section will name selected textbooks and one cannot
> > judge the correctness without having some context anyway.
>
> It is certainly foolish in many cases, and make-work, to reference
> specific and uncontroversial well-known facts. What is more it will tend to
> make articles unreadable, and effectively unwriteable also. This style is
> essentially only fit for very careful writing in doctoral dissertations with
> particularly terrifying examiners in mind.
>
> It seems clear that enWP could get overrun by nutty lawyering types, if a
> firm line is not taken. Is there not a 'statute of limitations' of sorts
> appropriate? When a piece of science is over 50 years old, one expects to
> read about the details of the original papers in a historical article. And
> the chances are that there are so many textbook citations that picking just
> one isn't a great help to students.


The other consideration for standard textbook references is that there may
be a dozen or more references to a single textbook (or indeed, the article
could be based entirely on one or two textbooks), which is cumbersome to
cite in-line. While using the reference name shortcut shortens things up,
it's still very tedious (and very distracting) if about every other sentence
has a citation link and every equation present has a citation link.

Carl