David Callan

About references vs. further reading, and welcome edit

Latest comment: 14 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi David,

You said:

Hi Rick, you undid revision 318535828 by David Callan citing: Reference section is for cited references. Pure research articles are often limited to cited references, but what's the rationale in general survey articles? What's the objection to a comprehensive bibliography?

The Callan ref in question is clearly relevant to the Monty Hall problem and likely to be of interest to anyone making a detailed study of the problem. How can I make it available to readers of the article?

David Callan (talk) 04:13, 8 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

The local style, per Wikipedia:Citing sources, is to only list citations in the "References" section and (see the Use of terms section of this guideline) to put additional general texts in a Further Reading, External Links, or Bibliography section. Guidelines for these sections are in Wikipedia:Layout (which doesn't really say much about deciding what is or is not appropriate to include), however Further Reading and External Links are more or less equivalent in intent. There are very well spelled out guidelines for External Links, see Wikipedia:External links - and by these guidelines the reference you're adding falls under the first item under "Links normally to be avoided" which basically says not to include a link (or uncited reference) if the content is something that should be in the article (which would turn the reference into a cited reference) if the article were to become a featured article. Monty Hall problem is already a featured article (and has been re-reviewed twice), which doesn't mean it's perfect but does raise the question of the significance of the point explained by this reference.

In addition, there are other issues with this reference. I assume you are the same Callan as the proposer of the question which means you have a conflict of interest here (see Wikipedia:Conflict of interest#Citing oneself). And even if there were not a conflict of interest I'd still remove this reference since it doesn't meet the standards of Wikipedia:Reliable sources (it appears to be at best self-published). If you look at the existing references I think you should notice that they are either the original sources raising the problem (e.g. Selvin's original letter to the editor or vos Savant's original Parade columns) or articles in peer reviewed journals. This particular problem has a wealth of such references - there's not much of anything that can be said about this problem that hasn't been said in a peer reviewed article.

I've gone into copious detail here in hopes that you don't find this to be a discouraging editing experience. I notice you made some edits several years ago but were never welcomed, so welcome to Wikipedia! I really do hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. You might check out Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics or Wikipedia:WikiProject Statistics. If you need help, see Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:11, 8 October 2009 (UTC)Reply

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