On 12/11/05, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/11/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote: Yes, but the harder we make it for people to start their first article, the less inviting we are, and the less wiki we become.
I take your second point first. Being less wiki is not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, being a wiki has taken us far, and making radical changes to our processes without thinking about it first is not a good idea. But we're not wiki just for the sake of being wiki. (In fact, we've already moved quite far from the original wiki principles, to the point where Sunir Shah, one of the early proponents of wikis, claims that Wikipedia is not a wiki.)
Your first point is that by making things harder we are less inviting. I think this is a more reasonable concern, but it still needs to be kept in balance. The fact is that typing in what source you happened to use usually takes about 5 seconds. On the other hand, someone who is reviewing the article you created would probably have to take at least a minute to find a source, and that assumes a good source can be found with a simple google search.
Like you, I too have created articles without including any references. But if I knew that chances were high my article was going to be deleted if I did so, I would have gladly spent the few seconds to list my source. Do you really think the extra few seconds is going to discourage a user from continuing to contribute?
Regardless of the recent proposals that temper growth of Wikipedia, we *are* still a wiki, with the (I hope) wiki philosophy that most things will generally tend to improve in the long run.
That things will improve in the long run is a given. The question is what do we want in the mean time.
Just to repeat the point that we should *encourage* people to do good work, not force them.
We're not forcing people to do good work. We're just deleting stuff which someone added without taking a few extra moments to follow the rules. It's the same as what happens when someone adds an image without a source.
Add {{unreferenced}}, don't speedy delete. There's a learning curve to wiki editing and encyclopedia writing.
Cormac
I'd be fine with just adding {{unreferenced}} if {{unreferenced}} included a statement that the article will be deleted if no source is added within 24 hours. Is that an adequete compromise?
Yes, there's a learning curve. Creating a new article is probably something you should save until you're further along the learning curve. But even if it isn't, I don't see the big deal. Your article gets deleted, you get a note on your talk page teaching you how to create a new article, and if you write back to someone (such as the admin who wrote on your talk page) telling them your source, your article gets restored. You've learned something and Wikipedia has improved in the process. All without relying on someone hunting down a source which the original submitter is in a much better position of providing.
But hey, the 24 hour thing seems like a good compromise. Then *anyone* has 24 hours to hunt down a source. And this would only be used for new articles, say ones created within 48 hours of the tag being added, or ones created after a certain date. Again, this is similar to what we did with images. Tagging is the first stage, but just tagging isn't a solution.
Anthony