On 4/21/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
I guess the list shows that {{unreferenced}} is overused. Most of the articles on the list are not in the least problematic.
I sampled ten articles - 3331 through 3340, just because they happened to be at the top of a column.
1. [[Lauren Green]] - No References section, but four External Links, which seem to actually include many of the references used to write the article. A mention of her political leanings has been marked with {{fact}}, and someone added {{unreferenced}} later on despite the existence of external links that were probably really references. 2. [[Almir Imširević]] - Unsourced stub, categorized, nothing questionable in there. 3. [[Robin Byrd]] - External links to own website and IMDB, despite which it has been tagged {{unsourced}}. Definitely needs more detailed references. 4. [[Sandra Sully (journalist)]]. Sourced to IMDB and one other reference. Clearly insufficient compared to length of article. 5. [[Paul Patrick]]. Article contains some external links inline but no real references. Article seems to have been created by an acquaintance of the subject. 6. [[Hage Geingob]] - Completely unsourced, although seems a good article in other ways. 7. [[John Mayhew]] - contains two references despite the {{unreferenced}} tag. 8. [[Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck]] - Unreferenced long stub/short article on this soccer player 9. [[Adrian Fenty]] - Contains an extensive number of references in the form of inline links, as well as a substantial External Links section. 10. [[Frank Monsalve]] - Contains one external link to his business, which contains a short biography; this is probably sufficient to source the content if not to establish notability.
So, out of ten articles tagged with {{unreferenced}}, only three were completely unsourced. The others seemed to have sufficient sourcing to at least verify basic biographical details. A couple were probably better referenced than your average article, e.g. [[Adrian Fenty]].
It seems that, regardless of intentions, people add {{unreferenced}} to articles that are at least partially referenced, seemingly as an alternative to {{fact}} if they see anything they question.
Thus, I don't think that the presence of {{unreferenced}} on an article means too much; judging by this, I don't think that this is a much lower standard of referencing than of ten articles chosen at random.
I think the articles we really have to worry about are those that nobody's noticed even to add a cleanup tag to.
-Matt