Charles Matthews (charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com) [041212 09:32]:
For the record, I think POV pushing is the single problem in relation to WP to which we don't have a working solution, as of end 2004. So I'm entirely behind Jimbo's analysis of the challenge. We have the eyeballs to fact-check with, in many areas; we have the eyeballs to see what is too vague to be checkable, as a practical matter if not as a legalistic definition. What we don't have, in practice, and what I feel the lack of, is the way of defining a 'pattern of POV editing' that would warrant warning and then sanctions. This ought to be seen as the current defining issue. Anyway, this all points back to the ArbCom elections as the real focus of Wiki-en's public life; which is only right and proper.
The POV-pushing problem can be alleviated to some extent with references. (e.g. when Mr-Natural-Health added a reference to [[Alternative medicine]] which someone looked up and pointed out it actually supported the opposite view to the one he was intending it to support).
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
I would love love love it if the standard edit boilerplate included the following as the first paragraph, on its own:
Have you remembered to include your references?
- with the word "references" being a link to a page on how to reference things. (Inline links, a mention in ==External links and references== ... Do we have a suitable page?) What would it take for this to happen? Can anyone see any insuperable problems with putting this in?
- d.