On 31 Jan 2006, at 00:52, Bryan Derksen wrote:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
I think we can have quite a simply solution to this. Do the same as we did to the images. Stuff which isn't cited within a week, can be speedy deleted like we do with images now. Just make sure it only applies to articles created after date X.
Articles without references are simply works in progress most of the time, and I definitely don't support the deletion of works in progress. Images are different since it's far harder to check them for copyright issues and such.
Instead of deleting such articles, how about simply withholding "stable" flags from all unreferenced versions (ie, all of them)?
Another idea would be to simply add an {{unreferenced}} or {{unsourced}} tag, to alert readers.
Deleting articles because they have no references is draconian.
15 years ago or so I worked on a specialist encyclopaedia. It was undersourced but was the standard reference in the field. Like wikipedia, you could contact the authors of the articles if you wanted better references. I did encourage the addition of sources a bit I seem to remember (even though I was doing proofreading mostly). It is not that important to have a reference for every fact - eventually people will dispute the ones that are unclear. Some sources is really helpful, and I agree that there are far too few references but this is a transitional issue - not enough of the real sources are online and books are not available to all. There are some great online projects (like http://www.british- history.ac.uk/) but most of the stuff I know about isnt online yet. Many things people write are memories from sources that they no longer have access to. There are also some bits of original research around that are not that problematic - one day they will be published elsewhere, I am not going to complain before that.
We also need to be prepared for the way the internet is changing availability of primary sources. It used to be that access to these was rare and available to only a few people. Encyclopaedias were written from secondary or tertiary sources. The "fancruft" of WP is perhaps a primer for what happens when primary sources are available without an academic commentary (webcomics or whatever). Fields that have been less restricted in access have always been more dominated by "non professionals" for example [[Ian Nairn]] as an important architectural critic.
Amateurism (in the old sense) and expertise are very important. "Academicism" where people need to have PhDs and use the Chicago Manual of Style and cite a reference for every sentence are not where we need to be going. They represent a kind of geeky view of knowledge as a pure collection of facts where synthesis is ignored; do we have to reference the order in which we present these referenced facts?
Justinc