You are confusing "citation" with "see also" or "other
references".
I know I'm right because Wiktionary agrees: 2 The act of citing a
passage from a book, or from another person, in his own words; also,
the passage or words quoted; quotation.
3 Enumeration; mention; as, a citation of facts.
If I write an article on a subject, it shows bad academic scruples for
me to cite sources I didn't use. Likewise, it is bad for Wikipedia for
somebody to add a cite to an article that didn't go into the writing
of the text, although that's not nessecarily true if it was used to
confirm a fact as opposed to it just being a good book on the subject.
For example, the English version of the article Trisceli recently
copied the cites line-for-line from the independently-written (ie, not
translated) Sicilian article, without adding text. This is poor.
Mark
On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 15:59:24 -0800, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
I think a very important issue here is whether to
add cites to
articles that we don't know what sources were used.
If I wrote the entire text of [[Japanese language]] (which I didn't,
this is just an example), without a cite, it would be a very horrible
thing in my mind if somebody added a cite for a book I'd never even
heard of. It's simply not accurate, and in some cases the book may not
even be a good resource.
Whenever somebody adds a random cite to an article written mostly or
entirely by me, I remove it unless I actually DID use that source.
It's very irritating to have people doing that, almost like bees, who
while they make honey also tend to annoy people.
That's not nice. It suggests that you have taken personal ownership of
the article. When somebody adds a citation, one should at least presume
that the person acted in good faith, and that he felt that the source
supported some of the things said in the article. How can you possibly
tell whether a book is a good resource if you've never heard of it? You
have no basis for determining that the cite is "random".
It's not as if he were referring to a source with a known biased
political point of view.
Ec