dmehkeri@swi.com wrote:
No really, I think people doing their own small samples of Special:Random is a great idea. Truly random sampling is more "scientific" than you might realize. I am not a statistician, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but if all you're trying to do is rule out the <20% and/or the >80% claim, then 25 clicks on Special:Random ought to be more than enough, 19 times out of 20.
In the spirit of this, I did my own Special:Random sample of 30. I found:
Unsourced: 13 1 Working External link/reference: 6 Printed only: 2 Multiple References: 8
Of the 13 unsourced articles, 3 were lists (and I didn't check the articles they were linking to for sources) 9 stubs, and only one was a full-blown article lacking sourcing. I may be in a minority on this one, but I find unsourced stubs much less problematic than unsourced ''articles'', so my personal findings gave me a lot more hope than I thought.
-Jeff