[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Article Improvement Weeks! (was Turn off article creation AND deletion.)

Sun Dec 11 21:36:29 UTC 2005

On 12/11/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> >Well, I think I've made it abundantly clear I disagree.  Those
> >mathematical articles should all be referenced.  The person who is in
> >the best position to do that is the original author.
> >
> For most of them, the original author is no better placed to reference
> them than anyone else, because they're results that appear in standard
> textbooks.  I could singlehandedly "reference" most of the linear
> algebra articles, for example, just by copy/pasting the reference list
> from [[linear algebra]] to the end of every one.  But in cases where
> something is a standard result in elementary textbooks, I don't see what
> advantage actually listing some arbitrarily chosen textbook gives the
> reader.
>
> -Mark

Hmm, I've tried to think of an article that this would apply to,
especially one which we haven't already written, and I really can't
come up with one.  Couldn't the author just reference the textbook
that she actually used?  For a strawman, let's take [[Myhill–Nerode
theorem]].  I assume you didn't start that article from memory.  You
did use a source, right?  Now given a few minutes of searching on
Google print I could probably come up with a source to verify that
information, but at the same time you could much more easily simply
list the book you actually used.

Anthony