Talk:Bin Laden Issue Station

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've reverted Ryulong's nonsense, which he should leave out of Wikipedia. If he has anything more intelligent to say, he should feel free. Frank Freeman 13:07, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Question on references

Personally, I find it important to know how many unique sources there are. Classic referencing would indeed go to the page level, but would also have the ibids, op cits, etc. so uniqueness was obvious.

I propose, at least with the 9/11 Report level, to go down to the chapter level, not page within chapter. That I can do; I don't have the cited books to be able to cite there. It is important, I believe, to be able to see how much comes from Coll vs. other sources.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:29, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I would have thought you'd find page references beneficial rather than confusing. They are useful for finding data in the online PDF version (of the 9/11 Report), when there isn't an exact quote to search for. (I placed the HTML versions *after* the page refs for this reason.)

Splitting the references and cross-referencing has resulted in the in-text numbers becoming rather messy and scattershot. Is this easier to follow?

And what has happened to poor John Fulton??

Frank Freeman (talk) 12:18, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Multiple references under one footnote

When a given ref has several distinct bibliographic citations under it, it is rather difficult to see how they source an item in the text. At first glance, they seem to refer to different things. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 15:12, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree that if I were checking references in conventional books, page numbers are useful. Given an online choice for reading, not printing, between HTML and PDF, I find HTML much more convenient.

While it is not the case here, there are articles that become obvious that they are primarily quoting one source, and that is more obvious with the page references deleted. I hope I have them commented out rather than deleted, so if there is a consensus they are useful, it's not hard to restore them.

Again, the references here seem legitimate. Perhaps I'm sensitive because I went through another article, which also had distinct POV problems, and found that a lot of the links were quotes of quotes of one non-neutral source.

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 14:19, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry....who is John Fulton?

... He's the feller you accidentally removed during the course of your editing, Howard. Frank Freeman (talk) 12:46, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Still a problem

It is extremely difficult to relate several different citations from the same large document, or multiple documents, to a single point being sourced. If the documents are saying the same thing in different places, then why is more than one citation helpful?

Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 18:34, 6 March 2008 (UTC)