[WikiEN-l] Citationgate: expertise and verifiability

Fri Sep 29 17:06:02 UTC 2006

On 29/09/06, Nathaniel Sheetz <preparing at psu.edu> wrote:

> Also, in response to the original post, citations do more than just serve as
> a way to verify the facts of an article.  They also show where the material
> came from, which is helpful for anyone doing research on a topic (high
> school, college, etc.) who can't directly cite Wikipedia (not many teachers
> allow that).  Our articles need to be written so that they can be used by as
> many people as possible, and I think that one way to do that is to
> religiously cite sources.

A separate ==Sources== section can be good for this.

> Nathaniel ([[User:Spangineer]], a real nuisance to many on FAC when it comes
> to citations)

Verifiability is important and in most cases, references are *good* -
the reader has no idea who the authors are, so only has the text and
maybe what references are clickable to figure out the text's value
from. Do please continue :-)

- d.