By "administrative groups" I meant category tree starting at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_maintenance cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 13:21, Haifeng Zhang <haifeng1(a)andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

I am familiar with the citation hunt tool, but am not much of a fan of it. Basically there is a tracking category built into the {{citation needed}} and citation hunt returns you a random article in that category showing you a few lines of text preceding the (I think) first needed citation in the article and you can choose to accept it or skip it (whereupon it offers you another one). Although intended as a lightweight way to try to engage librarians during 1lib1ref to scurry unto their collections to find a citation and add it. It sounds superficially like a great idea, unless you do outreach with librarians as I do and then you see how flawed it. If fails in at least three ways. The first is that just because there is a citation needed template present, it doesn’t follow that a citation will exists (it may be untrue information) so it is often a waste of time searching. An inherent problem with that template is that many people (librarians or others) may see it and try to find a citation. When they fail to find one, what do they do? Answer: do nothing and move on. Very few people feel confident to say “there is no citation, I will remove all the text associated with the template” as firstly they realise there may be a source that they failed to find and secondly they are uncertain how much preceding text to remove in any case. It’s hard to make that call as an experienced Wikipedian, it’s not an entry level task. The template does not have a field to record how many attempts have been made which might be accompanied by a (say) “3 strikes and it’s out” policy or a time-based deletion criteria. Once added {{citation needed}} tends to linger for years, wasting people’s time trying to resolve it. Problem 2. A librarian will be asked to find a citation for content unlikely to be held in their library; there are not a lot of books on baseball players in an Australian library. You can skips through an awful lot of suggestions before hitting one that might be in your collection. Although my personal observation is that most librarians don’t look in their collection, they look for a quick win with a simple google search which tends to fail (if it was that easy, it would already be cited). Problem 3. It is fundamentally sexist and some librarians notice this and comment on it to others. Who writes Wikipedia? Well, we know it’s predominantly men. Who are librarians? Predominantly women. So, ... the idea of using Citation Hunt for 1Lib1Ref is that a woman is being asked to do a lot of work (scouring their collection) to clean up after a lazy man who didn’t bother to do their job right in the first place. Why does this scenario seem familiar to many women? When you put it like that, would you ever suggest it again? I wouldn’t but WMF does. Instead I have come up with 1lib1ref tasks that add content with citation in topics that are relevant to the librarians I work with. The librarians see this as a very positive activity. The task is almost always do-able and adds content to a topic they perceive as relevant to their library’s focus (no baseball tasks). You can fix problem 2 though. If you use Petscan to compile some whole-of-category trees, you can run Citation Hunt over that smaller list of articles and keep the topics relevant to a particular group of librarians. I did this manually one year, now it’s built-in to the tool I think. So in terms of suggesting tasks to users, as much as resolving {{citation needed}} is a high value result if it succeeds, the success rate of actually doing so is low and the task can be frustrating. The other risk with new people doing is that they don’t understand what a reliable citation is so they may link to a Facebook post or a tweet or a webpage that on close inspection is a mirror of Wikipedia and again even as an experienced Wikipedia, I struggle to determine if a random webpage out there which is more or less identical to a Wikipedia article is a copy from Wikipedia (and hence not a reliable source) or whether the Wikipedia article is a copyvio of that webpage. I’d have to say that putting a time limit on {{citation needed}} would be a very good thing as it would limit the time questionable content exists without citation and we could use imminent deadlines as the basis for a Suggest A Task tool, on a “cite it or delete it” basis. This would empower people to delete. I’d go further and suggest that citation-needed should have short default time limits set on edits made by new users and the higher the importance or readership of the article, the lower the expiry time should be. I think this could be done with a bot where it is not set manually by the person who adds citation needed. It would be really great if Twinkle allowed you to add the citation needed tag and automatically set the expiry time according to whatever policies exist. Sent from my iPad