[Foundation-l] Sources and sourceability

Sat Dec 3 15:43:10 UTC 2005

On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Kat Walsh wrote:

> This seems like a reasonable approach... Actually, strike that, it
> seems like what we already should be doing, in theory -- isn't it
> already true that every fact must be sourceable? We (myself included)
> just aren't so good at enforcing it by catching questionable
> statements and trying to source them.

I would say yes, this is what we should be doing... but it is only in theory 
because it is so laborious to do right atm.

There's no simple visual/textual way to densely-source an article (though there 
have been various attempts); serious footnoting is unsupported in software and 
non-trivial to hack.  And there's not yet a culture of footnoting / citing the 
way there is a culture of stub-sorting -- the style guidelines for referencing 
exists, but should be more popular.

Finally, there is currently no way to maintain information *about* references, 
nor to maintain a single best-citation for each work. Every author has to 
figure out the proper full cite for a work, and cannot simply find the other 
pages/articles which used the same work.

A layered suggestion:

Step 1 : Strongly promote the current recommended footnote system:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes

Step 2 : Strongly encourage the use of proper full cites:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages/Sources_of_articles/Generic_citations

Step 3 : Add software features making each of these easier : add localizable 
strings for each field-name for cites and footnotes; then add 'footnote' and 
'cite' buttons to the edit toolbar; provide "footnote" markup that handles 
autonumbering; add a keyboard-shortcut for footnoting; add footnote- and 
citation-aware menu options to WP browser plugins.

Step 4 : Work on unifying "References"/ "Citations"/ "Sources"/ "Bibliography"/ 
"External link[s]"/ "Further reading" style at the end of each article.

Step 5 : Add separate 'references' pages for every article.  These pages should 
include: the date the article was created; the date of the last non-minor edit; 
the list of users, ips, and flagged-bots that have edited the article; a list 
of sources and other references that had been added at some point to the 
article; even a clear list of metadata about the article 
(protection/pov/cleanup/quality- assessment status).

Step 6 : Add a namespace/project to store the best-known information about 
every source used on any project, including user comments and trackbacks to 
articles referencing each source.  (Optionally: seed this project with OpenCat 
content.)

Step 6.5:  Add a wikitext feature like "{{cite:ISBN 0518274822|pp 12-23}}" 
which would subst: in the details of that work in proper citation format.

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikicite

SJ