Omegatron wrote: I'm heartened to hear that someone remembers what it's all about. The need for immediate references came about because of the Seigenthaler incident, which quite rightly forced us to pay attention in potentially libellous situations. Naturally it bred a whole crop of overreactors who really don't understand how an article grows. Ec

Thomas Dalton wrote: I still believe in that original idea, and as far asd I'm concerned it still is the whole idea. I feel secure enough that I don't obsess over whether we are trusted. I do not participate in that monomania where absolutely everything needs to be referenced. I don't feel besieged by vandals and spammers, though they do need to be confronted. I don't feel overwhelmed by a multitude of articles about garage bands and other trivia. Wikipedia is not paper, and with a little less attention from their detractors the stubby articles about them will eventually be as difficult to find as the bands themselves. They don't use up a lot of server memory. The need that you see is perfectly avoidable. Ec

On 1/24/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually, I think most of the criticism leveled at Wikipedia isn't because it's not trustworthy. The criticism is because it *pretends* to be. Do you read the site as if it were a completely authoritative, flawless source of information? Of course you don't. We Wikipedians are always on the lookout for vandalism, bias, and falsehood. But to the outside world, the project is presented as an "encyclopedia", which most think of as an authoritative source of reliable information. Then they look up something that's dear to them and find an error, and get all bent out of shape and badmouth us. Instead of changing all the rules every week and restricting what people can do and restricting what people can say and restricting what you can enter without references and adding policies and guidelines and Reliable Sources and stable version and on and on to try to make the project 99.9999999%reliable, why don't we just make it very clear to newcomers how the site works? That most of the content is reliable and trustworthy, but keep your eyes peeled for errors? In fact, if you find one, you can fix it yourself! But most newcomers don't even realize how the site works until ''after'' they've found an error and then tried to figure out who's responsible for this horrible mess of a website oh my god it's an outrage. That's why I was trying to get the tagline changed to say "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", or "the community-written free encyclopedia" or some such. We even got Jimbo's attention for a few minutes ("something which is neither too long nor too boring nor too timid, but which helps the reader understand that Wikipedia is a work in progress"). But, alas...

On 1/25/07, Phil Sandifer &lt;Snowspinner(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This is mainly caused by our unwillingness to totally and utterly abandon every superseded citation/reference system. All you need to know is: -- Here is my fact.<ref>Here is my source<ref> ==References== <references /> -- Really. Just memorise that. Yay. Someone agrees that we have to get realistic. Steve

I think this preloading template would turn new users off more than AfD. I've never had an article I created put up for AfD, even my first new article ever, which I posted without any references, and which was one of my earliest edits. Making it clear to newcomers how the site works would be a good start. There are many things that I'll probably never figure out, like how to get to a WikiProject page, how to find the citations templates, how to find the vandalism templates (the first time I posted one without having to look at it up two editors jumped me for assuming the guy was a vandal, so I up up patrolling vandalism), how to insert a date into a reference, the code for references (today I tried {{references /}}, {{references/}, {{/ references}}, and {references /} before giving up), and which policies I should, as a newcomer, follow, and which ones will get me bitten or ridiculed. It's too convoluted looking things up on Wikipedia, and most of it is designed (it being the resources you need to know about to follow policies) for the computer savvy and heavy net user. Making it easier for newcomers would be better than loading a new template that only applies to newcomers. Oh, and I still can't figure out how to start a new article, so newcomers who do that are either starting new articles that return no search items from Wikipedia, which have a high chance of AfD, or they're not so new, I suspect. KP