User:The bellman/rfc


 * 01-2004 references

At the moment policy is very vauge regarding the referencing of sources. I think that this is a very important issue because wikipedia has as a core principle that it conducts no first hand research, and is solely an aggregater of other sources, hence i suggest that we need a unified policy on the referencing of sources.
 * 1) Wikipedia does not (can not, and possibly even should not) contain all the information there is on a topic, as such, an interested person who wants more information than that which we offer must have an easy way of finding that information which is built into the wikipedia structure.
 * 2) Users of wikipedia could quite resonably want to know where the information on a particular fact or sub-topic came from, rather than futher information on the subject in general.
 * 3) Wikipedia is already the largest and most complete encycopedia ever created. As Wikipedia continues to grow, two things will likely happen. The volume of spam and POV will increase, and (at least in the short term) the active user to number of articles ratio will move so that there will be less active users (although undoubtably more in absolute numbers) to article.

My suggestion: Another page containing meta-data should be appended to all articles along with discussion. This page should be displayed as a tab along with the other tabs and should include two types of references to the main article. First Refernces and second Endnotes. References would then be divided (automatically) into general references and references for specific sub-sections. On the project page each subsection would have some sort of marking which would be a link to the reference page. While the link is On the project page Endnotes would appear as superscripted linked numbers, which when clicked on would deliver the user to the refernce page