On 4/21/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
I guess the list shows that {{unreferenced}} is
overused. Most of the
articles on the list are not in the least problematic.
I sampled ten articles - 3331 through 3340, just because they happened
to be at the top of a column.
1. [[Lauren Green]] - No References section, but four External Links,
which seem to actually include many of the references used to write
the article. A mention of her political leanings has been marked with
{{fact}}, and someone added {{unreferenced}} later on despite the
existence of external links that were probably really references.
2. [[Almir Imširević]] - Unsourced stub, categorized, nothing
questionable in there.
3. [[Robin Byrd]] - External links to own website and IMDB, despite
which it has been tagged {{unsourced}}. Definitely needs more
detailed references.
4. [[Sandra Sully (journalist)]]. Sourced to IMDB and one other
reference. Clearly insufficient compared to length of article.
5. [[Paul Patrick]]. Article contains some external links inline but
no real references. Article seems to have been created by an
acquaintance of the subject.
6. [[Hage Geingob]] - Completely unsourced, although seems a good
article in other ways.
7. [[John Mayhew]] - contains two references despite the {{unreferenced}} tag.
8. [[Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck]] - Unreferenced long stub/short article
on this soccer player
9. [[Adrian Fenty]] - Contains an extensive number of references in
the form of inline links, as well as a substantial External Links
section.
10. [[Frank Monsalve]] - Contains one external link to his business,
which contains a short biography; this is probably sufficient to
source the content if not to establish notability.
So, out of ten articles tagged with {{unreferenced}}, only three were
completely unsourced. The others seemed to have sufficient sourcing
to at least verify basic biographical details. A couple were probably
better referenced than your average article, e.g. [[Adrian Fenty]].
It seems that, regardless of intentions, people add {{unreferenced}}
to articles that are at least partially referenced, seemingly as an
alternative to {{fact}} if they see anything they question.
Thus, I don't think that the presence of {{unreferenced}} on an
article means too much; judging by this, I don't think that this is a
much lower standard of referencing than of ten articles chosen at
random.
I think the articles we really have to worry about are those that
nobody's noticed even to add a cleanup tag to.
-Matt