[WikiEN-l] External links and attributions

Sat Jan 10 11:21:34 UTC 2004

> From: "Graham Burnett" <grahamburnett at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] External links in articles, and a citations
> 	feature?

> Personally i'd like to see MORE external links/citations, and was even
> thinking of proposing a feature for including citations or attributiuons
> within articles.
> 
> From: Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com>
> 
> put them at the bottom of the article, under Extternal links, under
> References. Then reference them in the text as you would in a english
> composition class paper.

I would really like to see more use of attributions, references, citations 
within Wikipedia.  Traditional encyclopedias don't do very much of this, but 
I think this is a serious weakness on their part.  The traditional 
encyclopedia simply speaks _ex cathedra_, and the only reason you have for 
believing it is that "they wouldn't print it if it weren't true." Even if 
(reportedly) the U. S. version of Microsoft Encarta says the light bulb was 
invented by Edison, and the British version says it was Swan. (The old 
Britannica used to at least have the articles initialed, so you at least knew 
that "well, Lord Rayleigh thinks so.")

I remember being shocked in high school when I learned for the first time 
that an encyclopedia could not be referenced in a scholarly article because 
it didn't meet scholarly standards for attribution.

I don't know why print encyclopedias don't choose to reference their sources. 
Presumably it's limited space, and/or a desire not to clutter up the article 
with footnotes. Or perhaps it's a feeling that for the stubby two-paragraph 
articles the article-to-references ratio wouldn't be very high.  Wikipedia 
has fewer space limitations. 

However, wiki-markup has no convenient way of representing footnotes and 
citations.  In my fantasy, some hypertexty mechanism could give you the best 
of both world--invisible footnotes that don't interrupt the text but can be 
made visible if you want to trace the authority for something.

I agree that there's nothing to stop anyone from doing what Christopher Mahan 
suggests.  And that would be a good thing.

But at the very least, I'd like to see a convenient way of doing an inter-
page link, so that you can put a citation in the text that is just an 
unobtrusive thing like a single character, such that clicking on it takes you 
to the reference in the references section--AND automatically puts a RETURN-
link in the reference. I believe you can do this today with hand-tuned HTML, 
but...

It seems to me that a policy that encourages the inclusion of references, and 
a markup mechanism that makes them easy to write and read, would support in 
the spirit of NPOV and "X REPORTS Y ABOUT Z." 