User talk:Technical 13/Templates/Overcite

Here's my thoughts on the citation overkill template. I'm trying to look at it from all angles, because i really hope that it will become an accepted template. Here's some points we could discuss...

References serve several purposes. We should keep in mind that references aren't just a way to defend your edits, but also a service to the users of WP. An important, but often neglected purpose is as a source of further reading. Overkill of citations doesn't just reduce readability. It also makes it harder to find the best (most authorative/most relevant/most well written) reference for further reading. We don't have to mention that in the template, but it's something to keep in the back of our mind when talking about references.
In an article with hundreds of references it's also just harder to navigate through the references. But i don't think that should be mentioned in the template.
Personally i would emphasize trimming over merging. I'd be fine with leaving out the part about merging alltogether. In most cases, I'd prefer picking a few good references over retaining a large number of references as a trimmed list.
In stead i'd like to add a point that sometimes it's possible to (greatly) reduce the overall amount of references by reusing a reference more often. For example, in an article about a certain disease, a few review articles by authorative sources in high-impact journals can act as a great reference for many statements in the WP article, greatly reducing the number of references. Such review articles are a great start for further reading and then the references in there can be used for even more in-depth reading.
I wonder if we should make the distinction between controversial and generally accepted statements. To take two extremes as examples; in articles about feminism and video games (where i recently sensed a lot of pov pushing), multiple references might be desirable on some controversial statements, whereas on the article on HDMI, i doubt there will ever by much discussion. And if there is, it's often based on a lack of technical understanding more so than on differing opinions.
We could consider making a statement along the lines of Wikipedia:BLUE, but i think that's a bit tricky and it may detract from the purpose of the citation overkill template.
The image in the template seems like several parts of a single work. An image that shows a bunch of different books would better visually emphasize the point.

Looking forward to reading your views. PizzaMan (♨♨) 12:58, 16 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there. I have trimming as a first option to make it the one they are more likely to do. I just added reusing as a third option, but would object to switching it to the second and putting merging last. At that size, I couldn't find a better multiple book image of books, so that's what I went with, open to change if you have some suggestions for better images. I'd rather not add much more to the template, and certainly no more than is needed. If we want people to read them and make fixes based on what they say, they should be brief and to the point. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 23:42, 16 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Technical 13, I'd leave out the "so they interrupt the text less frequently" part. I agree that the template should be short and that means there's not enough space to adequately go into the why of reducing references. Above i mentioned several other reasons to trim citations, which hopefully are useful in the discussion. But the template is not the place to go into all of that. PizzaMan (♨♨) 09:12, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]