User:Looie496/Sandbox


 * Let me try to respond to these points, with apologies for length. I think in general it is difficult for somebody unfamiliar with a topic to verify statements from articles that have a broad scope.  Let me take examples from the topics you yourself work on.  In an article about the Holodomor, where most of the material relates to specific events that happened at a definite time and place, one would expect nearly every claim to be attributable to a specific page in a specific source.  But suppose you are writing about socialism, where a good article requires synthesizing information from huge numbers of sources, you will find it much more difficult.  I think you will find that it is really impossible for somebody who does not know anything about socialism to properly verify your statements, and that pointing to a specific page that says something broadly resembling the statement you have written is very difficult (presuming that you have written the material in your own words), and not really all that helpful.


 * The brain article resembles socialism in that it has to give an overview of a literature that includes millions of publications, and there are many points where I had one or two sentences to summarize the contents of whole books, and do so in my own words. There are no sources, other than encyclopedia articles, that face such extreme demands for terseness, so it is often very difficult to find a single page in a specific source that serves to fully verify a sentence from the article.  In the case of drugs, for example, "Drugs and Behavior" is a standard university course, for which there are at least a dozen textbooks available, and a literature of many thousands of journal articles -- and I have two sentences to summarize all this.