On Apr 10, 2007, at 8:37 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/10/07, Phil Sandifer
<Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Because we shouldn't treat newbies like
they're idiots who can't
understand how we do things. How about "Sourcing articles is
important. It's not always the first priority, but it's an issue."
Most of them *are* idiots. See [[WP:AFC]].
Then we're screwed. Period.
Or, better
yet, how about we don't treat "newbies" as a homogenous
class. I read some policy pages and found myself on RFA discussing
someone's nomination within a day or two of getting to Wikipedia.
You're unusual. :)
True. But most people are unusual for some definition of unusual.
There's just no telling at all whether a newbie
will stick around at
all, will read the policy documents etc. And since we do actually want
sources, where is the harm in telling newbies that they have to source
any article they create? Hell, I add at least *one* source for every
article I make. Where's the harm?
I figure we can tell a newbie maybe (maybe) three things. Because,
well, we don't want to overwhelm them or try to Taylorize them.
#1 has to be NPOV. Period. End of discussion.
#2 should be to use talk pages, as they remain somewhat non-obvious.
#3 could then be "cite sources," but I think verifiability is vastly
more important for this.
-Phil