On 12/11/05, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/11/05, Anthony DiPierro
<wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:
Yes, but the harder we make it for people to start their first
article, the less inviting we are, and the less wiki we become.
I take your second point first. Being less wiki is not necessarily a
bad thing. Yes, being a wiki has taken us far, and making radical
changes to our processes without thinking about it first is not a good
idea. But we're not wiki just for the sake of being wiki. (In fact,
we've already moved quite far from the original wiki principles, to
the point where Sunir Shah, one of the early proponents of wikis,
claims that Wikipedia is not a wiki.)
Your first point is that by making things harder we are less inviting.
I think this is a more reasonable concern, but it still needs to be
kept in balance. The fact is that typing in what source you happened
to use usually takes about 5 seconds. On the other hand, someone who
is reviewing the article you created would probably have to take at
least a minute to find a source, and that assumes a good source can be
found with a simple google search.
Like you, I too have created articles without including any
references. But if I knew that chances were high my article was going
to be deleted if I did so, I would have gladly spent the few seconds
to list my source. Do you really think the extra few seconds is going
to discourage a user from continuing to contribute?
Regardless of the recent proposals that temper growth
of Wikipedia, we
*are* still a wiki, with the (I hope) wiki philosophy that most things
will generally tend to improve in the long run.
That things will improve in the long run is a given. The question is
what do we want in the mean time.
Just to repeat the
point that we should *encourage* people to do good work, not force
them.
We're not forcing people to do good work. We're just deleting stuff
which someone added without taking a few extra moments to follow the
rules. It's the same as what happens when someone adds an image
without a source.
Add {{unreferenced}}, don't speedy delete.
There's a learning
curve to wiki editing and encyclopedia writing.
Cormac
I'd be fine with just adding {{unreferenced}} if {{unreferenced}}
included a statement that the article will be deleted if no source is
added within 24 hours. Is that an adequete compromise?
Yes, there's a learning curve. Creating a new article is probably
something you should save until you're further along the learning
curve. But even if it isn't, I don't see the big deal. Your article
gets deleted, you get a note on your talk page teaching you how to
create a new article, and if you write back to someone (such as the
admin who wrote on your talk page) telling them your source, your
article gets restored. You've learned something and Wikipedia has
improved in the process. All without relying on someone hunting down
a source which the original submitter is in a much better position of
providing.
But hey, the 24 hour thing seems like a good compromise. Then
*anyone* has 24 hours to hunt down a source. And this would only be
used for new articles, say ones created within 48 hours of the tag
being added, or ones created after a certain date. Again, this is
similar to what we did with images. Tagging is the first stage, but
just tagging isn't a solution.
Anthony