On 12/11/05, Delirium <delirium(a)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