I've been checking our FAs, and they too contain unsourced material. It is presumably sourced in the general references somewhere. The best way of making such article totally unreadable would be to put inline sources for every sentence. The only place I have ever seen it done is some of the more recondite academic works in the humanities, the ones where there is actually a greater amount of footnotes than text. I appreciate it very much when I want to actually see the detailed state of knowledge on a fully professional level in one of the relatively few areas where I know enough to do it. I do not appreciate it when I want to read about something in an encyclopedia. The point of an encyclopedia is to summarize knowledge, not simply reproduce it. We want to be correct, but we do not want to be pedantic.
But even the most extensive inline references do assume the reader's good faith in there not being omissions of significant. Selective footnoting, like selective quoting, is a standard method of one-sided argument. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 7:31 PM, William Pietri <[email protected]> wrote: > On 01/26/2010 01:18 PM, Ken Arromdee wrote: >> The problem is that even if you're only supposed to remove contentious >> unsourced material, there's absolutely nothing anyone can do to you if you >> remove noncontentious material. >> > > I think it's reasonable to ask the remover if they're actually > contending the quality of the material, or otherwise believe it to be > contentious. > > I'm sure some small fraction of people will be disingenuous about the > contentiousness of some paragraph, but we have other ways of dealing > with people who have a pattern of acting in bad faith. > > William > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
