orig. posted to foundation-l
I heartily wish that so many good contributors didn't see sourcing as a chore, perhaps even detrimental to their own ability to contribute.
Since this thread seems to be going all over the place about article quality generally, let me get up on my soapbox about why adding good sources and sourcing as you write is important. Doing so:
- improves your own understanding of a topic, as you have to check that you do, in fact, have the details right;
- helps point out gaps in the article, as more comprehensive works on a topic will likely document aspects of a topic that you, as an encyclopedist, have not yet considered or added to the article;
- helps provide balance to the article, as when doing research you may come across points of view and aspects of a topic that you were previously unfamiliar with (this also can be the intriguing and fun part of adding to your own knowledge);
- improves the factual accuracy of the article (every time I sit down to fully source an unreferenced article I find details that differ from the aggregated published literature; this is not, I believe, an artifact of the topics I pick, but a reflection of both the way that articles tend to drift and that contributors may not always have flawless memories);
- makes the article a better resource for the reader who may be interested in finding out more about a topic or particular aspect of a topic; also improves the reader's confidence in that article, and by extension the entire project (cf. J.B. Murray's exhortation to his WP:MMM students to only use sourced articles -- as a professor and Wikipedia user, he is certainly not alone in using sourcing as a metric of article quality);
- aids students and others who are just beginning to learn about a topic, and are not yet familiar with the literature in a field (or the literature in that language!) A good bibliography and reference list will point out the seminal and comprehensive works in a field, as well as pointing a reader to easily accessible documentation for facts;
- helps create a bibliographic record for that topic, which is just one part of building a comprehensive reference resource;
- provides a starting place for other contributors who may want to expand, copyedit, tighten, or otherwise improve the article (per discussion in this thread).
Of course it is possible to write an okay article without listing your sources, or consulting new ones. But it is *not* possible to write a great article without doing so -- and we should all aspire to greatness!