On 3/31/07, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
- The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error- free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones is foolish.
This is a false dialectic. It's not a binary choice; please stop presenting it as one. Nobody expects an error-free encyclopedia, but a lot of us would like one with fewer errors than the one we have now.
Almost all of us would. Now, how can that be done? Preferably a way which doesn't involve randomly or automatically (via bot) deleting articles.
Find some errors, and get rid of them, would be the most direct approach. Find potential errors (i.e. unsourced statements), and get rid of them, would be a bit more drastic one. But both of these are already policy. So what's the next step?
Maybe an open mailing list for non-confidential complaints, to complement the closed OTRS for confidential complaints? Mailing lists are probably kind of inefficient for this, though.
Code would be great, of course, but as I'm not currently able to contribute any myself I'll leave that part out. Abolishing AfD would probably free up a lot of people's time.
Does anyone have a list of figures of the magnitude of the problem? Number of biographies, number of unsourced biographies, results of a study of how many errors there are on average, blah blah blah?
Anthony