[Foundation-l] Re: Enforcing WP:CITE

Thu Dec 1 05:46:59 UTC 2005

There was a discussion a while back about introducing
new citation markup as part of the Wikicite project. 
Yet today there is still no specialized mark-up for
defining citations within an article.  At best there
is the footnote feature, which replicates the
typographic conventions of citation in the print world
down to its fundamental limitations, such as its
inability to clearly delimit its own scope (i.e. which
parts of the text make use of a particular citation). 
This problem is compounded in a wiki content-creation
environment; an editor can- in complete good faith-
insert new content in the middle of a footnote'd
sentence that hides the fact the new material is
completely uncited.

My proposal back then was to use an enclosing citation
markup, something like:

[[cite:ISBN:000000001X:p215|"cited
text"|"paraphrase"]]

Though this was meant as a stepping-stone to other
projects, in the near-term it can be used to catch
"citation holes" within an article by having the
renderer flag those areas of text that are unsourced. 
Not only will this warn readers which sections of an
article are unreliable, it will also direct editors to
those parts of it most in need of their attention. 
Here is my mock-up of the idea:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:WikiTextrose_article_citations.png

Outside of a few exceptions, an article should ideally
have a citation for EVERY factual assertion.  Walter's
example of the Soi article actually only confirms my
point.  There may be no books on the subject, but
there are probably lots of other "texts", such as
maps, guide books, civil engineering manuals, etc.

> 5) Almost all sois also have a name.
> 
> I first wanted to be bolder as I have never seen a
> soi that doesn't also 
> have a name. But I decided to be a bit less sure
> about it

By encouraging editors to prove every assertion with
evidence, we confront one of the most prevalent, if
lesser, evils on Wikipedia (which I've certainly been
guilty of before)- the resort to "obvious"
off-the-top-of-the-head knowledge which may not quite
be true, is probably remembered less than accurately,
and so must be couched in many qualifiers to hide
these two facts.

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