On 4/1/07, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
The whole argument about deleting unsourced articles ignores the experience we have had with image uploads - being forced to pick a license tends to push people towards just picking any one license.
I came across an unsourced (and unwikified) article about a town in Trinidad today. It was only a one-sentence article, so I fixed it up a little, but didn't really expand it. I looked around for some references online, but couldn't find any quickly. What I did find was mention of a book at documentary about the town, done by a notable historian. I feel confident that the book covers the information in the article (there's so little, and much of it is commonsense), so it would be pretty safe to cite the book as a source. Safe, but dishonest, since I have never seen the book.
This also shows how pushing too hard on the Sourcing issue promotes a bias against the third world and the like which have a lesser internet presence.
In addition, the presence of a source is no guarantee of accuracy. If I had
known the book well enough, I could have added it as a reference. Then suppose someone else came along and added some more material. Someone else comes along later, checks the page history, and realises that some of the material came after the source. There is no way for them to determine if the person who added the source had seen the new material (and left it, because it was in keeping with the source), or if they missed the edit, and have no idea that this material has been added to the article. A casual reader never even looks at the page history, so they see both the original statements and the additions, and they seen a reference.
Sure, stable versions could fix this. Deleting unreferenced articles, on the other hand, could not fix this (and would encourage people to add spurious references, just to prevent the article from being deleted). _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l