The proposal only requires one source. It doesn't take 30 days to find that. I seriously doubt that if this proposal goes ahead, any article that actually passes [[WP:V]] will be deleted in it, because all of them will be cited by someone who's watching them (at some stage)

On 7/18/07, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:

A friend who supports that proposal defended it to me earlier today, saying, that WP will be better for it 4 or 5 years down the road, after all the deleted articles have been rewritten and restored. My view remains that there are other encyclopedia to work on more suited to that attitude.

Anyone can mark more unsourced articles in 30 minutes than a hundred people could source properly in 30 days. (Of course, it is possible to put some sort of source into an article rather fast, if one accepts the outdated and the over-general.) There is a great deal of questionable material in WP -- perhaps it would be wiser to source it first --properly and carefully, article by article -- before entering into large scale campaigns to redo the whole thing.

On 7/18/07, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:

...

Please see: [[Wikipedia:Requests for verification]]

http://tinyurl.com/ypmy36

A proposal designed as a process similar to {{prod}} to delete articles without sources if no sources are provided in 30 days.

It reads:

" It has been suggested that this article might not meet Wikipedias's core content policies Verifiability and/or No original research. If references are not cited within a month, the disputed information will be removed.

If you can address this concern by sourcing please edit this page and do so. You may remove this message if you reference the article.

The article may be deleted if this message remains in place for 30 days. (This template was added: XXX XX 2007.)

If you created the article, please don't take offense. Instead, improve the article so that it is acceptable according to Verifiability and/or No original research."

Some editors see this as necessary to improve Wikipedia as a whole and assert that this idea is supported by policy, and others ( me included) see this as a negative thing for the project with the potential of loss of articles that could be easily sourced.

I would encourage your comments in that page's talk.

-- Jossi

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-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.

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On 7/17/07, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:

There is absolutely nothing at present to stop someone popping a PROD tag onto an unsourced article. We don't need a "new" process for that.

I think I agree with Tony on this. The key element here is the desired result, not the process.

If you think something should be kept, then you can find sources for it.

If you think it should be deleted, then you can submit it to any of several existing deletion processes.

If you don't know what you think the result would be, that is, if after you have read the article and searched for sources you are still unable to form an opinion on it, you would do better to just leave it alone.

—C.W.

On 7/18/07, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:

While I'm not exactly an inclusionist, this project seems like a duplicate version of {{prod}}.

Well I am an inclusionist, except for things where I am not able to find a source. And I do search as long and hard for them as google will allow.

If I have looked but can't find a source for something I would probably feel that it should be deleted sooner than "30 days".

—C.W.

I think this is against our policy/logic on stubs. Good idea (dealing with unsourced articles), bad method (deleting them). A group of people googleing for sources and improving the article would be more productive.

- White Cat

On 7/18/07, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:

On Jul 17, 2007, at 10:11 PM, Charlotte Webb wrote:

...

If I have looked but can't find a source for something I would probably feel that it should be deleted sooner than "30 days".

So would I, by placing a {{prod}} on that article.

-- Jossi

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Equally there is the problem of people creating articles/categories/templates to push forward a political agenda. Our policies make it difficult to get rid of the soapboxness...

- White Cat

On 7/18/07, K P kpbotany@gmail.com wrote:

There's got to be a change in how we do things than AfD, though--it's broken, hostile and fully gamed. Here's another user who joined just to delete articles, his very first post was an AfD, a few days ago and that's mostly what he does:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&dir=prev...

Something really has to change, because it's just a nasty place where people are trying to change Wikipedia policy by deleting types of articles they don't like--again, like the group that nominates categories for deletion or conversion into lists then the lists are upped for deletion.

What's the use of policy if there is none because it's being created by people with agendas? Their agends, by the way, seem largely anti-religion categories and lists.

KP

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Giggy wrote:

The proposal only requires one source. It doesn't take 30 days to find that. I seriously doubt that if this proposal goes ahead, any article that actually passes [[WP:V]] will be deleted in it, because all of them will be cited by someone who's watching them (at some stage)

If it's so easy to do why can't the people pushing this proposal just find one. Either they're too goddamn lazy to do it themselves, or they are insisting that the original contributor do it just to be dicks.

It gets very tiresome when a gang of nitwits insists on sources that they don't understand, just for the sake of having sources. These guys might as well use their personal stack of comic books as references for any random article.

There are at least two librarians posting to this list, and both have supported cautious and informed views about handling these issues.

If those who are mad with the power of deletion took a little time to fix these articles the encyclopedia would get better faster. The already constructive editors would also be able to do more because they wouldn't need to spend half of their time looking over their shoulder to see what the immature are trying to delete next.

Ec

White Cat wrote:

I personally started quite a number of stubs myself. Although they are trivial to cite (the cities are there for example), I do not have that kind of time. Citing a source proving weather that a city (or country) exists or not takes fewer clicks and time than tagging the page, waiting a full 30 days, verifying that page never had sources (vandals may have intentionally removed the source links), and actualy deleting it... If you want to go on a delete craze, you are welcome to exercise it more productively on orphaned fair use images and etc where the deletion is clearly warranted for legal reasons if nothing else.

With the usual apologies for pointing out wrong words, I wonder "whether" you really intend to talk about the notability of the "weather" in these cities. ;-)

The handling of fair use images has controversial elements of its own. I wonder if we might arrive at earlier solutions to these problems without mixing them together.

This is really "curing the patient by killing". You would be solving the symptoms but the patient will not be benefiting from it.

When the surgery kills the patient perhaps we should sew the body back up with colourful holiday ribbon.

Ec

On 18/07/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

If it's so easy to do why can't the people pushing this proposal just find one. Either they're too goddamn lazy to do it themselves, or they are insisting that the original contributor do it just to be dicks.

It gets very tiresome when a gang of nitwits insists on sources that they don't understand, just for the sake of having sources. These guys might as well use their personal stack of comic books as references for any random article.

These two paragraphs... don't gell very well.

a) the complainant ought to find sources b) the complainant won't understand the sources

Adding sources you yourself don't understand? Incompetent and stupid. Asking people who do understand them and know the literature in the field to provide sources? Appropriate.

I don't think "do it or die" is useful in most cases (see below), but this insistence that the person demanding a source be obliged to provide it is silly. There are no ends of topics where - well, yes, you could google and find something supporting that, but you don't understand the topic well enough to know what that source is, if it's reliable, if this is a common misconception on the Internet...

A "source" is not just "a website that says the same thing".

There are at least two librarians posting to this list, and both have supported cautious and informed views about handling these issues.

I'm a third one, and for what it's worth I support the use of "cite this *now* or it dies a flaming flaming death" in appropriate cases. [[Demographics of Latvia]] is not an appropriate case. [[Notorious rapists]] is!

There are some articles that basically consist of nasty claims, yet have no sources. If we remove all the unsourced and potentially defamatory claims, we get "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian" rather than "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian criminal best known for molesting several young moose over a seven-year period in 1992", and at that point the article is pretty much worth quietly losing.

So I take out the claims, slap a prod tag on it, and let it be. To my delight, this has been mostly successful - only two or three got reverted with whiny edit summaries, and one of them got taken to AFD and deleted anyway (on the grounds that we really, really aren't a sex offenders registry). I strongly feel the encyclopedia was substantially better for doing this, and isn't that the point?

On 18/07/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:

...

So I take out the claims, slap a prod tag on it, and let it be. To my delight, this has been mostly successful - only two or three got reverted with whiny edit summaries, and one of them got taken to AFD and deleted anyway (on the grounds that we really, really aren't a sex offenders registry). I strongly feel the encyclopedia was substantially better for doing this, and isn't that the point?

Absolutely. What I'm afraid of is that this process/PROD will end up being used on articles like [[Demographics of Latvia]] simply because there are far too many idiot gold farmers out there.

Mmm. I don't think we need a new formal process for this - but I do think the existing expansion of PROD into "put up or shut up" is occasionally necessary.

On 18/07/07, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:

put up or shut up is bureaucracy which is a violation of [[WP:NOT]]. Articles should never EVER be tagged for deletion for the sake of a process.

No, this is for the sake of the encyclopedia. You've heard of it, right? This project that some people work on between arguing on wikien-l?

If an article has trivial flaws (such as lack of sources), correcting is much easier, faster, and productive than involving any kind of process.

Well, if you can tell me how I can "easily and quickly" source an article which appears likely to rely on Australian newspaper articles from the 1980s, then sure.

Not everything is on the internet. Not everything is clear-cut and comprehensible. Not everything can be resolved by a nonspecialist. Saying "if you don't find sources yourself you shouldn't ask for them" is just symptomatic of this obsession we have with google as the source to all our dilemmas.

Any situation where the sourcing is so obvious as to be "trivial" to solve, it's not going to be appropriate to mark it for deletion. This is patently obvious. It's the more dubious cases that are the problem - and they do exist.

On 7/18/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

The failure of some to look for obvious sourcing is more frustrating than the dubious cases that you mention. The problems that accompany the dubious cases are of a different nature than simple existence problems.

I agree. There's almost nothing more frustrating than someone going to the effort to try and delete an article, when 30 sec with Google and 2 min with the article would produce adequate references for what is currently accurate but unreferenced.

I don't want to encourage people to do the zap-delete route rather than the fix-it route. The opinion that "Someone should fix the unreferenced stuff" is reasonable, but the someone is YOU, if it bugs you.

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, John Lee wrote:

Yep. My main fear is that this process becomes a haven for goldfarmers who want to rack up their edit/delete/tag count without reading the articles. The last thing we ought to be encouraging is a templated mechanical process that does not look at the individual circumstances of every article.

I knew I should have waited a few posts before making sarcastic comparisons to the deletion of spoiler warnings.

On 7/18/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, John Lee wrote:

...

Yep. My main fear is that this process becomes a haven for goldfarmers

who

...

want to rack up their edit/delete/tag count without reading the

articles.

...

The last thing we ought to be encouraging is a templated mechanical

process

...

that does not look at the individual circumstances of every article.

I knew I should have waited a few posts before making sarcastic comparisons to the deletion of spoiler warnings.

You're assuming I supported the mechanical process of mass spoiler warning removals. I think spoiler warnings are a bad idea, but I recognise that their usefulness depends on the circumstances.

As an aside, your sarcastic comparisons may be misplaced considering that if you dispute the removal of a spoiler warning, you can add it back, while undoing deletions (without causing a wheel war/desysopings) is a significantly harder and lengthier process.

Johnleemk

On 18/07/07, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007, John Lee wrote:

...

As an aside, your sarcastic comparisons may be misplaced considering that if you dispute the removal of a spoiler warning, you can add it back, while undoing deletions (without causing a wheel war/desysopings) is a significantly harder and lengthier process.

Undoing the deletion of spoiler warnings in a way which actually looks at each one individually to see where it should be placed is much harder than deleting them. For one thing, you can find all links to the spoiler warning template to delete them, with nothing comparable when adding them. For another, you don't need to read the article to delete them, but you do need to read the article to add them.

So far you've argued for spoilers in the MFD, when the MFD was turned into an RFC, on the talk page of the guideline, here and in a rejected arbitration request, without drumming up much in the way of support. I put it to you that your views on spoilers might conceivably be completely at odds with the pulse of Wikipedia.

- d.

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007, John Lee wrote:

So basically you're saying you would prefer it if you could blanket revert blanket removals? I don't see two wrongs making a right; if you ask me, individual editors should have made decisions on a case-by-case basis, regardless of whether they are adding or removing a tag.

No, I was replying to something which said basically "it's a bad idea to make massive sets of scripted changes that are hard to reverse". It was outside the context of spoiler warnings, but seemed very appropriate to them.

I was pointing out the irony, not recommending a course of action to fix it.

And if reverting blanket removals was possible, it would have already been done, and not by me. The whole reason the blanket removals were effective is that they couldn't be easily reverted, after all.

On 7/18/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:

On 7/18/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

...

...

There are at least two librarians posting to this list, and both have supported cautious and informed views about handling these issues.

I'm a third one, and for what it's worth I support the use of "cite this *now* or it dies a flaming flaming death" in appropriate cases. [[Demographics of Latvia]] is not an appropriate case. [[Notorious rapists]] is!

There are some articles that basically consist of nasty claims, yet have no sources. If we remove all the unsourced and potentially defamatory claims, we get "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian" rather than "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian criminal best known for molesting several young moose over a seven-year period in 1992", and at that point the article is pretty much worth quietly losing.

So I take out the claims, slap a prod tag on it, and let it be. To my delight, this has been mostly successful - only two or three got reverted with whiny edit summaries, and one of them got taken to AFD and deleted anyway (on the grounds that we really, really aren't a sex offenders registry). I strongly feel the encyclopedia was substantially better for doing this, and isn't that the point?

Absolutely. What I'm afraid of is that this process/PROD will end up being used on articles like [[Demographics of Latvia]] simply because there are far too many idiot gold farmers out there.

Johnleemk _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

If something is garbage, it should be {{prod}}'ed for being garbage not because it isn't sourced. Sourced garbage is still garbage.

- White Cat

As you say, this sort of problem is already covered by existed policy and established practice, and does not need the policy. But the proposed policy will remove the positive material as well.

...

There are some articles that basically consist of nasty claims, yet

have no sources. If we remove all the unsourced and potentially defamatory claims, we get "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian" rather than "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian criminal best known for molesting several young moose over a seven-year period in 1992", and at that point the article is pretty much worth quietly losing.

So I take out the claims, slap a prod tag on it, and let it be. To my delight, this has been mostly successful - only two or three got reverted with whiny edit summaries, and one of them got taken to AFD and deleted anyway (on the grounds that we really, really aren't a sex offenders registry). I strongly feel the encyclopedia was substantially better for doing this, and isn't that the point?

--

• Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk

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Bryan Derksen wrote:

Why is there this need for a hard and fast deadline? Wikipedia's been doing fine without one...

That's what I'd like to know.

The backers of this proposal need to show not merely that it is derivable from existing policy without contradiction, but also that the new mechanism is necessary, that existing mechanisms are insufficient.

Me, I've been reasonably astonished at the vast quantity of sources that have been added to Wikipedia over the past several months, as more people have been more prone to sprinkle {{fact}} tags, and as editors everywhere have been diligently addressing them.

The process is working well, and won't be (and doesn't need to be) hurried along any faster. The only likely significant effects of the proposed new template are therefore the negative ones.

Because it would appear that some people wish to remove all unsourced information. Unfortunately that results in stubs like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cann_Quarry_Canal

That have wikicode that is pretty much impossible for a new editor to comprehend.

I've fixed that article. Adding footnotes to the same reference on each sentence is just stupid. Just putting the reference at the end is fine. Anyone that tries to claim something is unsourced without actually looking at the reference can just be ignored. If people checking for unsourced statements aren't going to actually look at sources, then they are going to miss statements which cite a source but aren't supported by the source, which is even worse than unsourced statements.

Doesn't work too well with paper sources. It is unreasonable to expect people to spend large amount of time in a libiary before deciding which bits are and which bits are not sourced particularly if the article is expanded in more than one go or I decide to expand the [[Salisbury and Southampton Canal]] article using Edwin Welch's "The Bankrupt Canal"

There is no way for them to know what bits are sourced correctly without going and finding the source, whether it's cited a dozen times or once. As I've said, incorrectly sourced is far worse than unsourced.

...

There is no way for them to know what bits are sourced correctly without going and finding the source, whether it's cited a dozen times or once.

No but they will know the bits that no one is claiming are sourced.

Which isn't particularly useful information. It's just the low hanging fruit, most of the work required in verifying articles are correctly sourced is checking the sources actually exist and say what it is claimed they say. At the moment, we do very little of that kind of work. I think that's because it is so much more work than just saying "there is a footnote next to the sentence, that'll do" and just worrying about those without footnotes. The other problem is that there is currently no way of marking a source as verified. I can't think of a simple system to do that which isn't open to major abuse (to work it needs to be open to everyone, an admin-only wouldn't work, and opening it to everyone makes using sockpuppets to verify fake sources you've added all too easy).