Perspectives on #references, #citations

Wikipedia articles, scientific papers and some books have them: citations. Depending on your outlook, citations serve a different purpose. They exist to prove a point or to enable further reading. These differing purposes are not without friction.

In science, it makes sense to cite the original research establishing a fact. Important because when such a fact is retracted, the whole chain of citing papers may need to be reconsidered. In a Wikipedia article it is imho a bit different. For many people references are next level reading material and therefore a well written text expanding on the article is to be preferred, it helps bring things together.

When you consider the points made in a book to be important, like the (many) points made in Superior, the book by Angela Saini, you can expand the Wikidata item for the book by including its citations. It is one way to underline a point because those who seek such information will find a lot of additional reading and confirmation for the points made.

Adding citations in Wikidata often means that the sources and its authors are to be introduced. It takes some doing and by adding DOI, ORCiD, VIAF, and or Google Scholar data it is easy to make future connections. When you care to add citations to this book with me, this is my project page.
Thanks,
     GerardM