On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
2009/4/1 doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com>om>:
Is it perhaps time, that we started to demand
that basic sourcing was a
pre-requisite of creating an article on any living person?
Without commenting on this specific proposal, I thought it interesting
that the
de.wikipedia.org community implemented a fairly simple way to
drive more sourcing on all articles: They made the edit summary field
mandatory for new users, and have renamed it to "Summary and Sources",
making it clear in lots of places that edits without sources aren't
acceptable. If you look at anon recent-changes on de.wp, you'll notice
that this has led to lots of people including URLs, etc., directly in
their edit summaries. [1] This makes it at least a bit easier for
other users to decide on whether the edit was legitimate.
[1]
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Letzte_%C3%84nderungen&am…
- As an interesting side note, the mandatory summary script doesn't
seem to trigger on section edits, and those are still very frequently
unexplained.
This is pretty great, and could be an easy, painless way to up
sourcing across the board. Certainly, footnote syntax is so confusing
that many people just don't bother; and this would probably help with
identifying copyvios as well.
A while (years?) ago the idea came up of using some sort of semantic
form for new articles that included, explicitly, a box for sources;
and I think that is a great idea as well. In the meantime, what about
a link at the top of the create an article box to the code for a basic
article that could be pasted in, including a refs section? Or a link
to a step by step article creation tutorial, like on Articles for
creation?
I am all in favor of seeing if we can change people's behavior in
subtle ways; it will take many solutions all working together to fix
blp's.
-- phoebe