On 4/21/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)att.net> wrote:
That may be true, in the sense that not every
unreferenced article
raises major ethical concerns. Though it's undeniable that we have
seriously flawed articles, and if that includes so much as one out of a
hundred of these, it's far too many. Maybe we should delete most of our
overused templates and encourage people to actually work on articles
instead of playing with tags.
Now that'd be the trick, wouldn't it? Although categorizing articles
by quality metrics is certainly useful, my gut feeling after looking
at a selection of these tagged articles is that the referencing isn't
really much worse, if at all, than a random pick of untagged articles.
Part of this is that exactly what {{unreferenced}} means isn't really
all that much. All it means is that some editor at some point decided
that the article needed more references than it then had. It says
nothing about what proportion of the article is not supported by its
sources. It says nothing, in most cases, about what exactly the
problem is. It says nothing about the kind of statements that are
lacking references. And, frankly, it doesn't even mean that the
article lacks for references at all - given that tags are often not
removed even if the article is fixed, and that the tags generally
reflect a single editor's opinion.
It seems as if in many cases the article is so-tagged simply because
the reference material is found in a ==External links== rather than
==References== section.
-Matt