On 1/30/06, Guettarda <guettarda(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, I did keep the list. I'll keep my reasons for not following your suggestion to myself, to avoid offending anyone. Presumably you would like me to email the list to you so you can carry out this work? If you're impatient, feel free to start hitting that "random article" button - you'll find lots more like I did. Steve

On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Matt Brown wrote: Er, what is this "modern referencing standards" you are talking about? Is this some new thing that was voted on & made policy without much fanfare, or are you referring to some academic standard like the _MLA Handbook_? If it is the later, I can show you many examples of unsatisfactory referencing in modern publications, & excellent examples in older publications. If it is the former, I need to point out that in the last month I have encountered a wide variety of opinions from other Wikipedians on how this should be done to conclude that most believe that "proper referencing standards" is another way of saying "this is how I think it should be done". (As for me, I like footnotes & use them when in doubt. But I won't footnote a statement if it is reasonably close to the section I have just footnoted, & try not to overuse them. And I wish the MLA hadn't deprecated the use of "ibid." & "op. cit.") For the first couple of years I contributed to Wikipedia (up to about the time David Gerard came on board) I was more concerned with avoiding copyright infringements than proper research & reference practices. (For example, if pressed about some of the material I contributed to the Classical & Roman Empire topics, I doubt I could do much more than to point at some of the standard references like the Oxford Classical Dictionary or some other books on my shelves & say "I think it came from somewhere in there.") I know I'm not the only person who did this: I remember encountering the hundreds of mythology-related articles that Tuff-Kat added in those days, & wondering which PD encyclopedia he had copied the information out of. (Not to pick on Tuf-Kat; AFAICS, all of that material looked reliable. And I could mention other, less salubrious examples of material copied into Wikipedia from those days.) Geoff

On 1/30/06, Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)agora.rdrop.com> wrote: Referring to a purely Wikipedia definition of 'modern' - in other words, up til about 2 years ago there was little push to give references. Sometimes we did, but not all that often. More often, we just linked a few relevant external links that were probably among where we got the info from. There's a lot of articles I wrote in my first year on Wikipedia that I'd extensively reference if I did them now. -Matt

I wonder if this won't encourage the addition of crap references, with people throwing up the first google hit they find on a subject as a "reference" in order to save a stub from deletion. On 1/30/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: This isn't simple; it's simplistic. While an image is a relatively uneditable form the same is not true of text. Any edit can easily invalidate the supporting reference. Also any source can be slapped in that roughly deals with the subject and verifying all the details will not always be easy. I strongly support the need for references, but policy needs to adapt to circumstances. Some facts (such as those about living persons) need to be referenced more urgently than others. Article by article negotiations are more appropriate than arbitrary deadlines. Ec

On 31 Jan 2006, at 00:52, Bryan Derksen wrote: Another idea would be to simply add an {{unreferenced}} or {{unsourced}} tag, to alert readers. Deleting articles because they have no references is draconian. 15 years ago or so I worked on a specialist encyclopaedia. It was undersourced but was the standard reference in the field. Like wikipedia, you could contact the authors of the articles if you wanted better references. I did encourage the addition of sources a bit I seem to remember (even though I was doing proofreading mostly). It is not that important to have a reference for every fact - eventually people will dispute the ones that are unclear. Some sources is really helpful, and I agree that there are far too few references but this is a transitional issue - not enough of the real sources are online and books are not available to all. There are some great online projects (like http://www.british- history.ac.uk/) but most of the stuff I know about isnt online yet. Many things people write are memories from sources that they no longer have access to. There are also some bits of original research around that are not that problematic - one day they will be published elsewhere, I am not going to complain before that. We also need to be prepared for the way the internet is changing availability of primary sources. It used to be that access to these was rare and available to only a few people. Encyclopaedias were written from secondary or tertiary sources. The "fancruft" of WP is perhaps a primer for what happens when primary sources are available without an academic commentary (webcomics or whatever). Fields that have been less restricted in access have always been more dominated by "non professionals" for example [[Ian Nairn]] as an important architectural critic. Amateurism (in the old sense) and expertise are very important. "Academicism" where people need to have PhDs and use the Chicago Manual of Style and cite a reference for every sentence are not where we need to be going. They represent a kind of geeky view of knowledge as a pure collection of facts where synthesis is ignored; do we have to reference the order in which we present these referenced facts? Justinc

Nice! Are you interested in expanding it a bit, perhaps to include grades in various categories like adherence to MoS, PoV etc? It would be very interesting to get a few people together and regularly take samples of 1000 or so articles, to see whether things are getting better, worse etc. Steve

Hi, There is of course [[WP:GA]] but it's very painful to nominate an article at the moment - you have to add a template to the article talk page, edit the GA page, potentially edit a template referenced in the GA page, and update the count at the top of GA. Simply to say that IMHO this article is "not bad". Is there a list of reviewing proposals anywhere? I had a thought for one today whereby any user with at least 100 edits can add a review to any page they have never edited, giving scores out of 5 for comprehensiveness, sourcing, NPOV, and MoS adherence. Not a very thoroughly thought-through thought though...:) (wow...what a last sentence...it must be late...) Steve On 1/31/06, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote:

"geni" <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:f80608430601311503x28b13a09v85f5172993c15c5d@mail.gmail.com... [snip] I håd a nïce jümper büt the möõse åte it. -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]] ...like a straight line like that is resistable?

"Alphax (Wikipedia email)" <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:43E0A142.2010709@gmail.com... Near enough for jazz, or indeed for government work :-) The people responsible for encoding the previous message have been fired, BTW :-) -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]