I didn't know where this goes, if I posted it in the wrong place I apologize.

Am I the only one who finds it really flawed to write ''encyclopedic'' articles by using the footnote process? It's like inevitably inviting people to write original research. By using this process you can write about everything you want and claim it sourced while the overal subject covered would still not be encyclopedic. Citizendium also use this flawed system. Real encyclopedia's use the reference system, to provide works which were consulted to write the article. It's not because you can provide a footnote that it actually means that that thing goes there. You can fill almost every subject with irrelevencies hidden under the guise of it being sourced. Such a system is more used to defend a thesis, not to write an encyclopedic article.

Wikipedia's not actually an encyclopedia, though. It's a multi-player message board game. Footnotes help you keep libel in place for longer. They give your edits 2x bonus strength points.

Interesting thought. I think we should spend a little more time focusing on how these supposedly great articles are written.

Basically, someone writes something off the top of their head. Then, if it's challenged, both sides of the argument use Google to find "sources" and the mob evaluates who has the better finds. It's an "encyclopedia" built by Google searches.

The real good references are added almost as afterthoughts, usually by IP contributors who just happened to read a book on the subject and think someone else might want to know about it.

Now you know why SlimVirgin spends so much time WP:OWNing the WP:CITE (Citations) page and its cousins, and spent considerable political capital on the failed WP:ATT (Attribution) page: (S)He who controls the citations, controls Wikipedia. Her lackey, Crum375, does much of the actual scutwork for her. Their persistent and largely successful efforts to dominate their chosen articles is implemented predominantly through citation argument, resorting to blocks, bans, and other forms of less pseudo-intellectual intimidation only when that fails.

What Xidaf describes is a more traditional essay model for encyclopedae, and that model only works when the essay authors and their editors are trusted scholars. Wikipedia's utter lack of academic credibility leads it to the easily-manipulated citation model, and a bad version even of that, in that it allows editorial, partisan, and non-scholarly sources to be used with equal alacrity to more reliable ones, elevating the crappy sources and denigrating the good ones.

Ensuring accuracy is difficult enough even with specific referencing for every fact. Anything less is disastrous. The only problem is that we don't have nearly enough referencing.

Excuse me, but this is an absurd statement. Even if you're trapped in the citation model demanded by a lack of scholarly authorship, the issue is not the quantity of citations, but the quality of them. Adding bad (biased, misleading, partisan, unscholarly) citations to a wikipedia article makes the underlying truth harder to find, not easier.

Referencing assure that the overal subject is plus or minus covered as is in the references used. It prevents original research. The footnoting process on the other hand is misused. You can write anything you want by using such a process but it does not mean the overal article you wrote is overal covered as is in works covering the topic.

Footnotes are OK when you are covering for instance statistics, like the population of Canada etc. But that's all there is to it. Often people use footnotes to make statments which they find in one or two books and then connect two statments to come to a conclusion which is theirs.