On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2009/4/1 doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com:
Is it perhaps time, that we started to demand that basic sourcing was a pre-requisite of creating an article on any living person?
Without commenting on this specific proposal, I thought it interesting that the de.wikipedia.org community implemented a fairly simple way to drive more sourcing on all articles: They made the edit summary field mandatory for new users, and have renamed it to "Summary and Sources", making it clear in lots of places that edits without sources aren't acceptable. If you look at anon recent-changes on de.wp, you'll notice that this has led to lots of people including URLs, etc., directly in their edit summaries. [1] This makes it at least a bit easier for other users to decide on whether the edit was legitimate.
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Letzte_%C3%84nderungen&...
- As an interesting side note, the mandatory summary script doesn't
seem to trigger on section edits, and those are still very frequently unexplained.
This is pretty great, and could be an easy, painless way to up sourcing across the board. Certainly, footnote syntax is so confusing that many people just don't bother; and this would probably help with identifying copyvios as well.
A while (years?) ago the idea came up of using some sort of semantic form for new articles that included, explicitly, a box for sources; and I think that is a great idea as well. In the meantime, what about a link at the top of the create an article box to the code for a basic article that could be pasted in, including a refs section? Or a link to a step by step article creation tutorial, like on Articles for creation?
I am all in favor of seeing if we can change people's behavior in subtle ways; it will take many solutions all working together to fix blp's.
-- phoebe