User talk:KrebMarkt/Reference-driven content

Some Observations

Hi,

I read this take on the situation with interest. However there are a couple of points which I would take issue with, and perhaps this is because my take on this is somewhat more radically embittered by protracted personal experience than your's. You're absolutely spot on in your assertion that the enforcement of verifiability by drive-by tagging is a deeply uneven playing field. Citation frenzy is not only uneven in its application, it is frequently used by some editors vindictively and with malice aforethought. In this respect it plainly does not work; the baby inevitably ends up being thrown out with the bathwater and good content gets turned into sludge as interesting, albeit difficult, perhaps impossible, to citationaly verify insights disappear and turgid platitudes replace them. Moreover a crafty editor with a trained eye can more often than not marshall his/her citations so that they mean exactly what he/she wants them to mean, to the extent that they might not as well be there in the first place.

I don't think that citational verification means very much in the broader sweep of things. It has just become a fad of the current regime of policy-obsessed bureaucrats in overall charge of the asylum. As a for instance I have seen some excellent and incisive work turned into incoherent and plainly wrong rubbish as the drive for citation has replaced insight with repetitions of egregious yet citationally verifiable errors. I'm absolutely convinced that reference driven editing is not only boring and painful but often it is worse than having no references whatsoever. Sjc 19:21, 23 December 2009 (UTC)