[WikiEN-l] Handling unreferenced but likely-valid material

Thu Nov 30 01:19:15 UTC 2006

On 11/29/06, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com>
wrote:
>
>
> Steve Block wrote:
>
> > God yes.  I remember when I worked on the Tintin article, I had a whole
> > paragraph which was all sourced from the one source, so I cited that
> > source at the end of the paragraph, and someone came along and stuck a
> > cite template halfway in the middle of the paragraph.  I think the best
> > thing is to use the unreferenced tag and copy the sentences that one is
> > questioning to the talk page, where someone can dig a source out and
> > work out the best way to cite it.  I'm finding I'm writing some awful
> > articles in the sense of referencing tags at the minute.  I rescued
> > Kieth Chapman from csd recently, and find I reference the same source 6
> > times in the one article.  It just feels like overkill, but I can't
> > really work out how to best cite.
>
> One thing I continued from college is rampant overciting, to the point
> where you have articles like [[Kroger Babb]] where the <ref> tags are used
> with the same book 20 times, and it's either make the reference section
> 100 lines long of have a half-a-page-width of letters referring to each
> use of the book.
>
> I will say, though, I had the same problem with the whole paragraph issue
> (my general training was to worry about new referencing when you came to a
> new statement), but the only way to solve this in any particular way would
> be to mandate a certain type of referencing, something I'm extremely
> opposed to at this point.
>
> Damned if we do, damned if we don't, I suppose.
>
> -Jeff

I think it would be far preferable for the project goals to be arguing from
a position where articles are generally overreferenced down, trying to trim
for stylistic reasons.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com