[WikiEN-l] Re: note David Gerard's just placed on [[WT:AFD]]

Tue Jan 31 03:00:08 UTC 2006

Without commenting on the principle of the idea, I would like to point
out that there are no such things as "article subpages". All pages in
the main space are pure articles, with the exception of the shortcuts
and [[Main Page]] (i bet some smart-ass is going to throw some minute
exception at me that I forgot, but I'm pretty sure that those are the
only two). For your suggestion to work, we would need a new namespace,
as none of the current ones would be suitable for such a thing.

Now to comment on your suggestion: I think this is fundamentally
unworkable. Articles can change rapidly, and it would be a herculean
task to keep the citation page up to date. I think that it would
simply not be possible for it to function in a meaningful way. If we
reference so heavliy that it cannot fit into the article nicely, a
separate page is going to be way longer than the article itself.

It is true that every sentance in an article should be backed up by
sources. That does not mean that we have to actually put a superscript
above every single fact that we use. The fact is that when articles
are written for wikipedia, they are not PhD thesis' (I how no idea how
to pluralize that word) that have to be presented to a number of
proffessors for review. No, wikipedia articles is just that,
_articles_! They have to abide by certain criteria for style. In
short, a good wikipedia article has to be nice looking.

As long as we can make sure that a) all sources are listed in a
"References" section, b) very important facts are referenced directly
and c) that we can always produce credible sources for every fact when
queried, we should be fine!

As long as an article is actually sourced with sources listed, we
don't need to specify where exactly every fact came from! We are
trying to build an encyclopedia, and a large part of that goal is
readability.

Chhers!
--Oskar

On 1/30/06, Jesse Weinstein <jessw at netwood.net> wrote:
> On 1/25/06, Justin Cormack <justin at ...> wrote:
> > On 25 Jan 2006, at 21:47, Fred Bauder wrote:
> > > Properly done each fact (or set of facts) will point somehow to the
> > > source, including the page in the source.
> >
> > How? And how will the article still be readable? And what is a fact?
> > And what use is the page number
> > when there are loads of editions of a source?
> >
> > No encyclopaedia is written like this.
>
> I am sort of surprised and disturbed to see people getting so far-fetched with
> the task of specifying a source for each fact in an article.  We don't need
> magic new software tools, we don't need 500 obtrusive footnotes in the article,
> we don't need any of this.
>
> We can simply use a subpage.  On the subpage, put a list of quote from the
> article, followed by citations (and preferably quotes) from sources which
> support the quoted material from the article.  Simple, easy to do, requiring no
> magic software support.  The disadvantage is it dosn't automatically update if
> the article is changed, but on the other hand, that's actually an advantage; if
> the article changes, we *need* someone to review the references, so having the
> subpage not automatically update is actually a feature.
>
> People might object that such a subpage is "just too hard", or "too
> time-consuming", or various other things; my answer to this is simply - if you
> don't want to work on it, don't work on it.  It benefits the encyclopedia, by
> easing the task of factual verification; yes it will take many years to get lots
> done, but so what? Each piece we do is one more that's done.  This is not a
> problem, folks - it's just a big job.  Get to work! (if this is the sort of work
> you want to help with...)
>
> Jesse Weinstein (User:JesseW)
>
>
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