Gwern Branwen wrote:
On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
quiddity wrote:
What to do about someone who has "lost the
plot"?
For example, this editor seems to be going from article to article,
deleting every prose paragraph that doesn't have a ref tag (usually
everything except the intro sentence).
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=…
Some of the content being removed is obviously not good (selfpromoting
peacockery etc), but much is perfectly fine, and this seems to be one
of the worst (most indiscriminate) ways to handle the hypothetical
problem.
Suggest that one can drive-by even faster in adding {{fact}}? I think
this is the first step, the suggestion that identifying unsourced facts
is a way of achieving a similar end, and that we can all applaud it when
properly done.
Charles
And where does the {{fact}}-bombing end?
[[Medici bank]] is as finely referenced an article as I have ever (or
likely will ever) written with 96 footnotes, multiple books & papers
consulted, and extensive quoting - yet the overwhelming majority of
sentences lack <ref> tags and are presumably candidates for bombing.
Well, I think that in a well-written, well-sourced article people should
be still allowed to ask for further references. I foolishly copied the
basics of [[List of dissenting academies]] out of a book, thinking it
was a cheap article; and so far have added about 120 footnotes and
created around 50 articles at Wikisource to support it. Just shows where
these things can lead.
I actually had big problems with inline referencing style when it was a
hot potato, and I did start putting articles together sentence by
sentence. There were reassurances that it was not going to lead to
"lame" writing, and I think those were overdone (more precisely, in an
area where there is plenty of academic research at book length, you will
probably by OK, but that's quite a limitation). OTOH inline referenced
writing is now the house style, and actually there are worse things:
concision is good, and fact-checked encyclopedia articles are good, and
the fact that articles are never finished is a given.
Charles