I didn't actually notice all the citation tags, I was more determined to get the article out of the various "Articles with unsourced statements since 1154 A.D" or whatever, and I did have a difficult time finding a couple of tags at one point, having to search for the template. I know regular editors are different from the much more common "I can fix that" readitors, and trying to remove an article from a category isn't the normal way of doing things for a lot of people, but I didn't find the tags overly easy to find and deal with.
The point I'm trying to impress on people is that
a) References can be added to many articles almost as quickly and almost as easily as a template, and b) The reference for something might already exist in an existing citation and could easily be reused, taking, again, almost the same length of time as adding a template.
It's excess amounts of work that are quite annoying here, and I doubt many editors can get that warm goo-ie feeling from adding a template that we get from writing and referencing something.
I'm also going to suggest that if a number of articles have a number of references but a user quickly tags these articles as unreferenced or as needing citations, they're not doing the job correctly, they're not checking to see if existing references could cover what is being claimed, and need to be steered in the right direction.
Adding {{cn}} and other assorted templates is one of the great RfA edit count inflation techniques, it gets a user a healthy number of mainspace edits to help them pass an RfA, and yeah, it's probably a little helpful that they're doing what they're doing, but it's nothing like as helpful as fixing the problem when they see it.
On 08/10/2007, Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk wrote:
Nick wrote:
Personally, I'd rather see no further time wasted on templates, and
editors
time spent removing the need for these templates on as many different articles as possible. It's endless discussions on colours, decisions on changes and time editing these templates that could be much better spent adding references, fixing POV issues, dredging Flickr for free images
and
what not that has been wasted, in my opinion, on designing new
templates.
There's also a defeatist attitude here. There's some sort of bizarre
thought
that these templates are going to remain on articles for ever, maybe
they
are, but that's not the attitude we need here. Get them off pages as
quickly
as possible.
I seem to keep repeating myself over and over again, but instead of
tagging
a dozen pages, why not fix half a dozen pages. I remind our newer users
that
references can be really, really quickly created with http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/makeref.php and I heartily recommend
this
for anybody who would like to help with referencing but can't. I blitzed British Airways a couple of weeks ago and was able to remove all but one
of
the citation needs tags with five or ten minutes, only one point took
little
longer to reference. So, don't tag when you can reference, wikify or dePOV-ify something yourself within the amount of time you have
available.
</rant>
So, the citation tags worked as intended, then, by motivating you to replace them with the needed references?
-- Neil
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