[WikiEN-l] note David Gerard's just placed on [[WT:AFD]]

[Matt R]

--- Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>   The other thing worth cracking down on is new edits - Our policies 
> already allow us to revert a new edit that adds new information 
> without a reference. We should be doing this automatically.

That would be very harmful. Many (probably most) Wikipedia articles are
improved bit-by-bit. References are a "bit". We don't automatically revert
additions that contain spelling mistakes, do we? We don't automatically delete
new articles that fail to illustrate their topic with images, do we? Of course
not. It's entirely acceptable for:

1) Alice to add information; and then
2) Bob to add a reference for that information.

Yes, we should be encouraging people to cite their sources, obviously. And,
clearly, if an addition is suspect, it's quite proper to ask for sources,
possibly even removing it until a source is forthcoming in some cases. However,
I strongly oppose the proposal that providing sources is *immediately*
mandatory for every new fact added to an article. This would raise the amount
of effort needed to add content, and would cut out large amounts of legitimate,
useful contributions.

The time to put our foot down and make sources absolutely mandatory is when we
review a candidate for Featured Articles, and not when writing ordinary
articles that are still a work in progress at that point.

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com


		
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