[WikiEN-l] Citation obsession

[John Lee]

On 4/30/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But if you only have one cite in a paragraph someone will slap a
> > [citation needed] on individual facts within the paragraph.  There's
> > no way in Wikipedia to differentiate between "This cite covers the
> > entire paragraph" from "This cite covers this sentence" without
> > leaving a comment in the code.
>
> I would hope that someone adding {{fact}} tags will look at a citation
> at the end of the paragraph and see if it includes the information
> they are concerned about. If they don't, then it isn't hard to remove
> the fact tag.


That's harder than it sounds - God forbid someone actually read a citation
before mindlessly slapping a tag on it! In all seriousness, a lot of
citations are for offline material, which makes it difficult to immediately
verify that the citations contain the material in question.

I find it really annoying when people tag paragraphs which have already been
cited, but often there's no other way to distinguish what is verified
content and what is not. I do try to apply the cluestick when people don't
bother following up on online citations, however.

Johnleemk