On 1/24/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
- A casual editor who comes upon a mistake or a redlink is going to
fix it from their personal knowledge, not references.
This was, in fact, the original intended process for writing articles, no? With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow? That's the whole concept behind the wiki/open source thing that the project is based on. References were an afterthought, as indicated by our horrible kludgy support for them.
The whole concept behind Be Bold is to add information that you know, and not worry about referencing it; references will be added when needed. References are obviously a great thing, and should be added whenever possible, but should content really be removed just because it's not referenced?
At the very least, we shouldn't expect newcomers to figure out citation templates and Cite.php. Just figure out a way to encourage first-time editors to include some type of reference, in whatever form they can manage.