On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:15 PM, Robth wrote:
I disagree. Citing is not as difficult as you seem to think it is; if you're in the middle of writing an article based on sources that are sitting in front of you, it really isn't that hard to note down where the facts came from as you write them down (lately I've become a fan of the <ref>Unless otherwise noted, all details regarding [Subtopic X] are drawn from [Source Y], pp. A-Z.</ref> style for citing basic facts with relative ease). It's true that casual editors tend not to cite their contributions, but nobody does at first, and I think that the reason for this has less to do with unwillingness to do so than with the idea simply not occuring to people.
It's not unwillingness as such. In an earlier post I used the hypothetical example of Susan. I like this example, so I'll use it again here.
Susan is a 40-year-old stay at home mother who majored in English. While idly browsing, she has found an error in the article on [[Pride and Prejudice]] and wants to fix it. Her son gets off the school bus in five minutes.
Now my claim is that every policy and process on Wikipedia should be usable by Susan. That is to say that there should not be any rules that Susan cannot remember off the top of her head, there should not be any code or processes that Susan would have to look up, there should be no pages that Susan must check before she hits "Edit." Susan should be able to complete the task of fixing an error and still meet her son at the bus stop.
If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing precious seconds of Susan's time. (And beyond that, as I said elsewhere, if we depend on the low-hanging fruit of sources, which is what we do if we demand sourcing of people who don't have the time to do it right, we get crap sourcing. Constant crap sourcing is lower quality than we get if we trust people's memories some of the time.) If she has to go dig up her undergrad English textbook, it's a lost cause.
This is the problem. We conceived of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]] without thinking of usability problems. And so we have policies that can't be used by anyone other than us, the Wikipedia hardcore. Which is a tiny minority of our userbase.
-Phil