User talk:Uncle G/On sources and content

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Sorry to take so long to reply. I have outgrown the current wikimedia software's watchlist. What I really need is several more tunable watchlists -- like one that shows me articles I have edited in the last day, week, etcs, where someone has edited since me. Or one that just shows articles that have been nominated for deletion, or renamed.

Anyhow thanks for your comments on User talk:Geo Swan/nothing is obvious. It brought me to your essay.

An example of something people were willing to advance as obvious because it was "common knowledge" would be the aphorism that PT Barnum coined the aphorim There is a sucker born every minute. I started that article. About 9 months later it was nominated for deletion, with "deletionists" (my first encounter with that term) arguing the article should be merged with PT Barnum because it was common knowledge he coined the term.

I spent a couple of hours using google to see how the phrase was used in the real world. About half the articles that used the aphorism made no reference to Barnum at all. So a redirection to PT Barnum would be confusing. Those that mentioned Barnum were more or less evenly split between those that asserted the phrase was "commonly attributed" to Barnum and those that explicitly atributed it to Barnum. What I noticed is that the articles that attributed the phrase to Barnum were more poorly written and more poorly thought out than those that noted the phrase was "commonly attributed" to Barnum.

FWIW.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:26, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. I am going to assume you want those with a comment on your essay to leave it here on its talk page? Geo Swan (talk) 17:26, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Strawman?

In my opinion this essay contains strawman arguments, particularly in the presentation of the view that certain kinds of information should not be sourced.

The basis of that view is presented as "because common knowledge is hard to source", and is followed by a demonstration that common knowledge, by virtue of being common, is particularly easy to source. This sounds like a strawman argument to me.

Other arguments against sourcing of information in which one is spoilt for choice of sources might be:

That it places additional burdens on the reader. A high density of footnote references can make articles hard to read.
That it places additional burdens on future editors. Editors may be reluctant to remove information that ought to be removed if doing so would also remove references.

Also, it's hardly fair to use the word "canard" for a view considered legitimate by many informed people, such as the writers of Wikipedia:When_to_cite. 125.168.127.32 (talk) 04:19, 28 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

They'd be straw men only if they hadn't been made, as of course they all too often have been. Indeed, it is ironic that you haven't seen that not only are you pointing to people making these arguments, you yourself are making such arguments, here. The idea that readers are burdened is already debunked on the page, since it presumes a forced house style that is not in fact required. And the idea that future editors are "burdened" by this is just daft. It's quite possible to edit prose content without editing a citation elsewhere on the same page — including one next to the prose, even. You are grasping at straws, to find further arguments in support of a proposition that you would do better to realize is debunked and baseless. Uncle G (talk) 18:55, 30 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]