[WikiEN-l] No references in the "end product?"

Wed Oct 4 02:59:16 UTC 2006

On 04/10/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmmmm. Articles get refactored a *lot* around here, though.

Right. So consider a paragraph including a reference that gets cut out
and turned into its own article. And you put a very brief summary
sentence where the paragraph used to go, and you link to the new
article.

Problem: the number of references in the original article just went
down by 1. Are you seriously saying that we really need to come up
with another reference for the sentence? The actual reference is still
there in the new article and it is surrounded by text that it
justifies.

If you keep doing that repeatedly, you end up with a completely
unreferenced orginal article. But the amount of references in the
wikipedia has not gone down.

That's why I consider that a summary page in many cases needs few if
any references.

Yes, I know the policy. The policy is wrong in this kind of case. A
very well-linked article needs very few external references. I think
the FA process needs to count credit for internal references as if
they were external references; not at 1:1, but some number:1; 10:1
internal to external or something.

At the moment it's too all or nothing: ALL ARTICLES NEED REFERENCES.
INTERNAL LINKS DO NOT COUNT! Um. So refactoring is a bad thing then? I
DON'T CARE. EXTERMINATE- EXTERMINATE!

:-)

> - d.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."
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