Wiktionary talk:Votes/2016-12/"References" and "External sources"

Footnotes; source links vs. linked sources

This poll seems to be sneaking in a rather strong referencing policy that's not very clearly indicated at all by the proposal: all references would have to be what Wikipedia calls in-line references, while the use of non-inline sources would be evidently banned entirely?

This strikes me as much too strong to be practical in various common situations. For example, take a relatively simple reconstructed entry such as Proto-Uralic *kala. Each source listed is used for a wide variety of claims, such as 1) the form (segmental phonology) of the reconstruction; 2) the phonetics of the reconstruction; 3) the meaning of the reconstruction; 4) the cognateness of the various reflexes. Requiring purely in-line referencing would either lead to cramming the entry chock full of footnotes (literally every single claim made about reconstructed entries requires sourcing or other justification, strictly speaking), and something more complex, such as a PIE conjugation, would end up cluttered indeed.

You may also notice a separate External links section: this is being used to house a link to an exclusively online source, in this case {{R:Uralonet}} (which is in fact simply the online edition of {{R:UEW}}, and not a separate reference altogether). Having to move a source into this section, just because it happens to contain a link to a possibly link-rot-susceptible PDF (or, worse yet, Google Books!) version of a source that also exists in print would seem misleading to me.

If the intended purpose is simply to stop mixing auto-formatted with bullet-point lists of references, then Wikipedia's convention of separate "Footnotes" / "Notes" vs. "References" / "Literature" sections would probably work better. --Tropylium (talk) 16:45, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

External sources

As opposed to what, internal sources? But then, google:"External sources" finds a lot of hits, albeit many in a somewhat different meaning. Furthermore, "source" seems too suggestive of being source for the information on the page, which it really does not have to be; "External links" does not suffer from this. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:25, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

We may want to keep "External links", but I don't suppose an offline source like {{R:ga:Dinneen}} would fit that section? Or maybe it does? We may also want to choose another name: "Other sources", "Other works", etc. Maybe "Further reading", although it's not perfect, since we may want to link to a documentary video.

The answer to your "As opposed to what?" would be, according to this proposal: as opposed to "See also" (internal links) and to "References" (footnotes).

In defense of "External sources": All the proposed "External sources" are external and are sources. I take your point that "source" seems too suggestive of being source for the information on the page, and I'm okay with using other name or keeping "External links" if people want. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 07:53, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

I understand that "sources" is intended to cover references to sources that are not hyperlinks to online web pages. I am still not comfortable with "sources" all that much. I'll see what others think. --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:43, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

Examples

Before voting on this, I'd like to see how this proposal would look like in some actual entries. I have never or rarely seen footnotes used in definitions, yet definitions are sometimes based on sources. It would be nice to be able to verify that the application of this policy proposal would result in better organized (and better-looking) entries. Tropylium's comment above indicates that in one type of entry the proposal would result in more visual clutter. — Eru·tuon 07:21, 15 January 2017 (UTC)

Do you have any entries in mind that you would like to see how they would be formatted if the vote passes?

About the "definitions are sometimes based on sources", I'll quote @Angr's comment from the large discussion about this vote: "And ideally (but admittedly totally unrealistically), we should be writing our own definitions 'from the bottom up', i.e. on the basis of citations, rather than taking them from other dictionaries. For example, we should be saying that μῆνις (mênis) means 'wrath' not because LSJ tells us that's what it means, but because we observe that that's what it means in 'Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην'."

If this vote passes, and a definition is taken from a public domain dictionary, I believe the dictionary should be in the "External sources" section, not in the "References" section. That is because the existence in the PD dictionary does not prove that a definition exists, which is the job of citations. This was mentioned in the discussion linked above. There was a bit of text in the vote mentioning this, but I removed it; maybe I should readd it, because more people may have questions like that about definitions based on sources...

A definition can have footnotes when it makes claims that need evidence, like what I added in Goldbach's conjecture. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 07:38, 15 January 2017 (UTC)