On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 3:32 PM, bobolozo bobolozo@yahoo.com wrote:
Much of the text of Wikipedia is unsourced currently. In addition, due perhaps to lack of understanding of our policies, or just the desire to add sources, we have tens of thousands(at least) of unreliable sources listed as references. By doing a Special pages/External links search, it's not hard to find large numbers of these. A search on *.tripod.com, for example, gives 10,000+ links, many of which are being used as references. africanelections.tripod.com alone is linked to 484 articles, and is being presented as a source in multiple templates.
My question is, is it a good idea to simply go through and remove large numbers of these? Are we better off with no sources at all for portions of text, rather than have references which consist of message board postings and personal websites and such?
I noticed people using urbandictionary entries as references, and went through and removed all I could find, from about 100 articles (I left any links in External links sections, as having a link there is entirely different from having it listed as a reference). But now, having discovered the ease with which I can find thousands more unreliable sources as references, I'm wondering what others think of the mass removal of unreliable sources.
Am I correct in believing that we're better off having an unsourced paragraph of text, rather than a paragraph which has as a reference somedudeswebpage.tripod.com?
(And, yes, I know, it would be optimal to replace unreliable sources with reliable ones. But this would take about 100 times as long)
It is better to have a source than no source at all. If you must do this (I would not advise it), I strongly recommend you place the links on the talk page. But there is no real point anyway; references exist so our readers will know where we got our facts from. As Andrew says, if this was not a Tripod site, it would probably be ignored as an ok source. These refs should stay until we can find better ones.
Johnleemk