On 06 Sep 2004 11:26:00 +0200, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
David-
choose high ratings. These articles then attain a false notion of being authoritative. Similarly, controversial articles might never gain such status because some people don't like their content.
Yes, an abiding problem with ratings. I think ratings / flags are mainly useful as a tool for isolating targets for cleanup, and as a distributed vehicle for VfD-style comments (it would be nice to separate out as metadata the review/VfD/controversial status of an article) . As for source annotation and fact checking :
There's an interesting project going on here: http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
Indeed!
"??..??" means that this part of the article needs a source. Using CSS, all passages marked with "??" could be highlighted or not, depending on personal preferences.
or like this:
^+The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide [[Source:Behistun, p.84]]
Or [[Source:Behistun-1992|p. 84, see image caption]], where the source: reference produces the base of the footnote/reference, and the rest is specific information to be added at the end of the reference.
Using a method like this, we have real semantic information about individual facts and can easily make statements like
- 80% of the facts in this article have sources
- 40% of the sources we cite are of high quality
- Source X is used in Y articles
also * 20% of articles with <<NPOV>> tags reference more than one source * average # of (marked) significant verifiable facts per article
Of course these claims themselves could be faked. But together with stable-revision flagging and a consensus-based peer review process
Well, this gets us closer to a zero-knowledge proof of article validity and user reliability, as one can very directly and specifically check the accuracy or sincerity of another's work.
+Sj+