Brian wrote:
In light of the recent USA Today article:
What article? Would it not be better if you followed your own rules
about citing something before you go around spreading panic.
In the same way that we are currently enforcing proper
image tags
using a bot, could we do the same with unsourced articles? Start out
by placing {{unsourced}} in all the articles lacking sources, and
then, if it is not sourced in a week, create something like the
{{copvio}} page-replacer to hide the unsourced content (the entire
article), explaining with a detailed message that the article must be
thoroughly sourced.
This is absolutely unrealistic. The image tagging project has been
going on for perhaps a year (?), and it's gradually getting to where we
want it. No reliable editor opposes the idea of having pages properly
referenced, and ever since having referenced pages became the norm there
has been great progress in that area. Now because of one alleged
newspaper article you expect several hundred thousand articles to be
repaired in a week. If not you will on your own initiative have a bot
go through and delete any material that YOU find inappropriate.
Perhaps you should start by showing a little trust in your fellow
editors rather than begin with a series of hostile enforcement actions.
In my mind, at least, it doesn't seem like there
should be any
difference between enforcing sources for images and sources for
articles. If anything we should be enforcing the latter more, since
articles form the basis of the encyclopedia. I know this won't solve
everything, but I think it should be a vital part of Wikipedia; since
we do not know who edits an article, we need to know that it is based
on information that we can verify ourselves.
Although I agree that the text in articles is more important than the
images, which are mostly only there to make things look pretty, I also
think that two years might be a more realistic time frame for cleaning
this up.
Ec