[WikiEN-l] Re: Example vs. Original research

Mon Jul 25 19:51:19 UTC 2005

Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

> Let's take "The world is round." I have just spent ten minutes  
> browsing my bookshelves looking for the clearest citation. A popular  
> book by Menzel entitled Astronomy... nope. "A Field Guide to the  
> Stars and Planets?" Nope. "Norton's Star Atlas?" Nope. All of them  
> give the radius of the earth... but fail to say in so many words that  
> the world is round, because, well, everybody knows that.
>
> Aha. I have it.
>
> "The earth is approximately an oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened at  
> the poles.... For many navigational purposes the earth is assumed to  
> be a sphere, without intolerable error."

I mostly agree, but I think we should also avoid turning Wikipedia into 
a parody of citations, unless some way of producing "hidden" citations 
is developed.  It's been discussed on and off that there should be some 
way to tag parts of the article with a citation for facts, and if that 
were done they could also be given flags for whether they should appear 
as footnotes to the casual reader, or perhaps merely be available for 
people doing fact-checking or desiring a more detailed bibliography.

Without such a mechanism, we could end up with more footnotes than there 
are sentences in many articles.  Just looking at [[en:Paris]] for the 
moment, this is the first paragraph:

"Paris is the capital city of France, as well as the capital of the 
Ile-de-France region, whose territory encompasses Paris and its 
suburbs.  The city of Paris proper is also a departement, called Paris 
departement (French: departement de Paris)."

These are facts that might be worth getting citations for:
[1] Paris is the capital city of France.
[2] Paris is the capital of the Ile-de-France region.
[3] The Ile-de-France region's territory encompasses Paris and its suburbs.
[4] The city of Paris proper is also a departement, called Paris 
departement.

Presumably citations for these can be found in French law, and would be 
useful to have somewhere---someone might conceivably actually want to 
know exactly where it is specified officially that Paris is the capital 
city of France.  But I'm not sure we'd want to present readers with a 
barrage of footnotes for all these facts that they might take as fairly 
obvious---by the time you got the end of the article we might be on 
footnote #200.

-Mark