Help:Sources Consulted but Not Referenced

When doing research for a wiki article you're writing, you often find yourself studying Websites and books that you thought might yield major record collections or facts you'd need for the article. Sometimes these sites don't yield enough new information to make them worthy of citing in the article. For instance, if you're writing an article on Maps of Accident, Pennsylvania, you might find that Website A contains a couple of maps while Website B has all the maps found in Website A plus twenty more. In such a case, you might want to link the article to Website B and not link to Website A. However, you might want to let others know that you did consider Website A. So while you might not link the article to it or mention it in the article's footnotes, you might want to mention it somewhere.

One example of the way this problem can be solved is Maryland Maps, which is just being built. On the Discussion page, contributors can add to a bibliography of Maryland maps Websites and reference books. The bibliography table contains a column where contributors can add notes about the scope and depth of each source. This will help contributors evaluate sources side by side and consider which ones to include in the Maryland Maps page. The best sources will be added to the Maryland Maps page and will be referenced either with a link or a footnote. Meanwhile the sources which are not referenced in the Maryland Maps page can still be found in the bibliography.

Do you have an idea that improves upon this one? Please contribute to this article's Discussion page!