David Gerard wrote:
See, a lack of references is a real problem with Wikipedia's reliability and perceived reliability. That means you have nothing to start with on seeing if an article has a source or is just off the top of someone's head. It might be crap with a reference that doesn't support it, but at least then you have a chance to find out.
This particular tag seems a little redundant, because the presence or absence of references is pretty obvious when one is looking at an article. If the purpose of the tag to build up a category of articles for bored WPians to fix up, why not just add a simple "[[Category:Add references]]" to the bottom of the article? Not in readers' faces, still allows building up of the list to work on.
Or we could borrow the strategy of the recently-successful untagged images project, and use tools to build up a mega-list of articles missing "References"/"External links"/"Further readings" sections. All those US cities should just be able to have a boilerplate cite of the US census, etc. Seeing a lot of unsourced articles listed together should help inspire new techniques for efficient referencing too, just as the tagging project engendered a number of useful new image tags that have replaced the mishmash of license statements that people used to use.
Stan