Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
By the way, I really hope the experiment of switching off anon page creation is followed up with an experiment in switching off AFD for a month.
Isn't that a bit like experimenting with not taking out your trash for a month? They're both fairly unpleasant experiences that no one really wants to do, but they can't be halted without some other way of getting rid of the refuse.
If the volunteer garbagemen are driving people out of the town as hard as they can, it would probably be less damaging to the community and be a REALLY GOOD incentive to come up with something less socially toxic. See evidence in current RFAr.
- d.
On 12/8/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
By the way, I really hope the experiment of switching off anon page creation is followed up with an experiment in switching off AFD for a month.
Isn't that a bit like experimenting with not taking out your trash for a month? They're both fairly unpleasant experiences that no one really wants to do, but they can't be halted without some other way of getting rid of the refuse.
If the volunteer garbagemen are driving people out of the town as hard as they can, it would probably be less damaging to the community and be a REALLY GOOD incentive to come up with something less socially toxic. See evidence in current RFAr.
Right. And "trash" is more akin to speedy deletes, which is altogether different. AfD candidates are rarely hurting anyone; just out of place or against one or another content policy.
SJ
On 12/8/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
By the way, I really hope the experiment of switching off anon page creation is followed up with an experiment in switching off AFD for a month.
Isn't that a bit like experimenting with not taking out your trash for
a
month? They're both fairly unpleasant experiences that no one really
wants
to do, but they can't be halted without some other way of getting rid
of the
refuse.
If the volunteer garbagemen are driving people out of the town as hard as they can, it would probably be less damaging to the community and be a REALLY GOOD incentive to come up with something less socially toxic. See evidence in current RFAr.
Right. And "trash" is more akin to speedy deletes, which is altogether different. AfD candidates are rarely hurting anyone; just out of place or against one or another content policy.
Looking at the huge number of articles on AfD that are unanimously deleted, I'm not sure how else to describe them other than "trash". These articles may not be as bad as speedy deletes (the decaying food that will cause a stench if not quickly removed), but that doesn't mean they should be kept. What we need is a process to efficiently remove articles that currently receive 100% support for deletion on AfD. If these articles no longer had to go through AfD, I think we probably could scrap the whole thing and send the volunteer garbagemen packing.
Carbonite
Right. And "trash" is more akin to speedy deletes, which is altogether different. AfD candidates are rarely hurting anyone; just out of place or against one or another content policy.
Looking at the huge number of articles on AfD that are unanimously deleted, I'm not sure how else to describe them other than "trash". These articles may not be as bad as speedy deletes (the decaying food that will cause a stench if not quickly removed), but that doesn't mean they should
be
kept. What we need is a process to efficiently remove articles that currently receive 100% support for deletion on AfD. If these articles no longer had to go through AfD, I think we probably could scrap the whole thing and send the volunteer garbagemen packing.
Carbonite _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I think this has a lot of potential to help with efficiently removing articles that currently receive 100% support for deletion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_reform/Proposals/Uncontested _deletions
Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
By the way, I really hope the experiment of switching off anon page creation is followed up with an experiment in switching off AFD for a month.
Isn't that a bit like experimenting with not taking out your trash for
a
month? They're both fairly unpleasant experiences that no one really
wants
to do, but they can't be halted without some other way of getting rid
of the
refuse.
If the volunteer garbagemen are driving people out of the town as hard as they can, it would probably be less damaging to the community and be a REALLY GOOD incentive to come up with something less socially toxic. See evidence in current RFAr.
Right. And "trash" is more akin to speedy deletes, which is altogether different. AfD candidates are rarely hurting anyone; just out of place or against one or another content policy.
Looking at the huge number of articles on AfD that are unanimously deleted, I'm not sure how else to describe them other than "trash". These articles may not be as bad as speedy deletes (the decaying food that will cause a stench if not quickly removed), but that doesn't mean they should be kept. What we need is a process to efficiently remove articles that currently receive 100% support for deletion on AfD. If these articles no longer had to go through AfD, I think we probably could scrap the whole thing and send the volunteer garbagemen packing.
Carbonite
This might be a good time to plug my year-old proposal, [[Wikipedia:Preliminary Deletion]] (the only one to have ever received support from a majority of Wikipedians). Of course I'm not saying we should put up for yet another vote. It might be a good idea to review it and cull some material for the ongoing process of deletion reform (that's as slow as ever, I might add). For the umpteenth time, AFD isn't scaling. It works, but it's not scaling. Plain and simple. We're already seeing almost 200 article debates in one day. If we're 10 times smaller than Google or MSN, what happens when we reach that size? 2000 debates in a day. We'll have to break it down by hour! This simply ain't gonna' scale, folks. We need to come up with something. It's alright to proceed slowly, but from what I can see, deletion reform is as slow and as stalled as it was a year ago when I mooted Preliminary Deletion.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
On 12/8/05, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
By the way, I really hope the experiment of switching off anon page creation is followed up with an experiment in switching off AFD for a month.
Isn't that a bit like experimenting with not taking out your trash for
a
month? They're both fairly unpleasant experiences that no one really
wants
to do, but they can't be halted without some other way of getting rid
of the
refuse.
If the volunteer garbagemen are driving people out of the town as hard as they can, it would probably be less damaging to the community and be a REALLY GOOD incentive to come up with something less socially toxic. See evidence in current RFAr.
Right. And "trash" is more akin to speedy deletes, which is altogether different. AfD candidates are rarely hurting anyone; just out of place or against one or another content policy.
Looking at the huge number of articles on AfD that are unanimously deleted, I'm not sure how else to describe them other than "trash". These articles may not be as bad as speedy deletes (the decaying food that will cause a stench if not quickly removed), but that doesn't mean they should be kept. What we need is a process to efficiently remove articles that currently receive 100% support for deletion on AfD. If these articles no longer had to go through AfD, I think we probably could scrap the whole thing and send the volunteer garbagemen packing.
Carbonite
This might be a good time to plug my year-old proposal, [[Wikipedia:Preliminary Deletion]] (the only one to have ever received support from a majority of Wikipedians). Of course I'm not saying we should put up for yet another vote. It might be a good idea to review it and cull some material for the ongoing process of deletion reform (that's as slow as ever, I might add). For the umpteenth time, AFD isn't scaling. It works, but it's not scaling. Plain and simple. We're already seeing almost 200 article debates in one day. If we're 10 times smaller than Google or MSN, what happens when we reach that size? 2000 debates in a day. We'll have to break it down by hour! This simply ain't gonna' scale, folks. We need to come up with something. It's alright to proceed slowly, but from what I can see, deletion reform is as slow and as stalled as it was a year ago when I mooted Preliminary Deletion.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
We managed to expand speedy a bit.
-- geni
On 12/8/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Carbonite wrote:
On 12/8/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
By the way, I really hope the experiment of switching off anon page creation is followed up with an experiment in switching off AFD for a month.
Isn't that a bit like experimenting with not taking out your trash for a month? They're both fairly unpleasant experiences that no one really wants to do, but they can't be halted without some other way of getting rid of the refuse.
If the volunteer garbagemen are driving people out of the town as hard as they can, it would probably be less damaging to the community and be a REALLY GOOD incentive to come up with something less socially toxic. See evidence in current RFAr.
Look at the figures.
We get around 1500 new articles a day (this is when you count after seven days, after the obvious nonsense has been deleted).
Running flat out, AfD is struggling to cope with around 140 deletions a day and will probably start acting really funny at around 200.
Most new articles are, at this stage, of a quality that would cause many of those in AfD would throw up their hands in horror.
It doesn't matter, it's a wiki. That's how wikis work. If we turned off AfD for a month, maybe 5000 that would have been deleted would not have been deleted. But Wikipedia is growing at a rate of around 50,000 articles a month. And most of those new articles are as bad or worse than stuff is regularly deleted by AfD.
I suggest that we invest in technology to detect nonsense articles, commercial spam and the like. Mucking about with kids who write up their school rock band or write a webzine with two enthusiastic readers, one of whom is the editor's mom, isn't going to make a bit of difference. In six months time the kid will have moved on and the article can be purged because nobody's accessing it, it hasn't been edited much. and one or two humans (call them sluggish deleters if you like) have looked at the article to check that isn't an article about Darwin's speech on worm casts (redirect to [[Charles Darwin]]) or an article about a school magazine (merge with school article) or whatever.
AfD is ugly and quickly becoming completely useless. And it takes up so much of the energy of some of our most intelligent editors. Let's take a one month holiday from it and see what happens. The 5000 or so articles that won't be deleted are only equivalent to three days normal growth.
AfD is ugly and quickly becoming completely useless. And it takes up so much of the energy of some of our most intelligent editors. Let's take a one month holiday from it and see what happens. The 5000 or so articles that won't be deleted are only equivalent to three days normal growth.
I don't see how you can refer to 5000 articles that need deletion as being equivalent to something as positive as growth.
What you are forgetting is that such articles can be found by Google and thus by readers. Those 5000 articles will damage not only Wikipedia's credibility, but also use Wikipedia resources.
Also, quite a lot of them would simply be against basic policy, yet not speediable, meaning we'd basically being allowing stuff in against policy, which others would see as a reason to drop in more.
Ignoring a problem won't make it go away.
Mgm
Further to MGM's point, as we get more popular, more attention will be paid to us and we cannot afford to carry thousands of bad articles if we can avoid it.
Last week, we had editors of a Dartmouth campus newspaper try and sneak in an article about molecular economics and its supposed founder. It was picked up in AfD and deleted. If it had not been picked up, we would have had more embarrassing publicity.
In earlier years, the Siegenthaler incident would not have received nearly as much attention. We need to ensure quality control issues receive more attention not less.
Regards.
Keith Old
Keith Old User:Capitalistroadster On 12/9/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
I don't see how you can refer to 5000 articles that need deletion as being equivalent to something as positive as growth.
What you are forgetting is that such articles can be found by Google and thus by readers. Those 5000 articles will damage not only Wikipedia's credibility, but also use Wikipedia resources.
Also, quite a lot of them would simply be against basic policy, yet not speediable, meaning we'd basically being allowing stuff in against policy, which others would see as a reason to drop in more.
Ignoring a problem won't make it go away.
Mgm _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/9/05, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
Further to MGM's point, as we get more popular, more attention will be paid to us and we cannot afford to carry thousands of bad articles if we can avoid it.
We already do; after the speedies have done their pass, AfD only scratches the surface of crappy material, and human judgement being so variable, a lot of potentially good material also has to run the gauntlet. The only way to avoid the appearance of unencyclopedic articles on Wikipedia and their persistence on Wikipedia is to disable article creation. Or we can admit the obvious: that Wikipedia is a work in progress.
But your point about Google suggests a strategy for patrolling. There are lists of popular Google searches. Pop the top 100 of those into a database, renewed daily, and scan google results for Wikipedia pages. Dump the output as Wikipedia links in Wikipedia space somewhere as a hit list, and anyone who feels like checking them can do so and take any appropriate action. Feed back acceptable articles (not necessarily good, as they may need cleanup) into the database so that these can be pruned from the hit list to avoid duplication of work.
On 12/10/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/9/05, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
Further to MGM's point, as we get more popular, more attention will be paid to us and we cannot afford to carry thousands of bad articles if we can avoid it.
We already do; after the speedies have done their pass, AfD only scratches the surface of crappy material, and human judgement being so variable, a lot of potentially good material also has to run the gauntlet. The only way to avoid the appearance of unencyclopedic articles on Wikipedia and their persistence on Wikipedia is to disable article creation. Or we can admit the obvious: that Wikipedia is a work in progress.
Moreover, I'd say AFD is a horrible solution for "bad articles". The vast majority of "bad articles" deleted via AFD, which don't already fall under a speedy deletion criterion, could easily be either changed into a redirect or into a good, albeit short, article (usually on an obscure subject).
If you're saying we can't afford to carry good short articles on obscure subjects, well, I disagree there. We can afford to do it, and it doesn't require lowering our standards at all.
One thing we should probably introduce in this area though is that articles which do not provide any references should be speedy deletions. Now there are probably a whole lot of good articles out there right now which would fit that, so for now let's make the CSD criterion only for articles caught in the first 48 hours. And let's require the user who created the article to be informed of the deletion on her talk page.
Of course admins can and should be encouraged to add references instead of just deleting the article. But it's not a requirement. Yes, some potentially good articles might be deleted. But as this only affects new articles right now, it's no worse than turning off new article creation completely. Yes, some people will intentionally troll Wikipedia with obscure sources that can't be easily verified. This doesn't fix that, something else will have to. But it's not a new problem.
Unverifiable information in the encyclopedia is kind of like images without any license information. It's such a huge problem (or at least it was a year ago) we can't just delete them all outright. But we should stop the influx of new articles like this.
Anthony
On 12/11/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/10/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
The only way to avoid the appearance of unencyclopedic articles on Wikipedia and their persistence on Wikipedia is to disable article creation. Or we can admit the obvious: that Wikipedia is a work in progress.
Moreover, I'd say AFD is a horrible solution for "bad articles". The vast majority of "bad articles" deleted via AFD, which don't already fall under a speedy deletion criterion, could easily be either changed into a redirect or into a good, albeit short, article (usually on an obscure subject).
If you're saying we can't afford to carry good short articles on obscure subjects, well, I disagree there. We can afford to do it, and it doesn't require lowering our standards at all.
Yes.
One thing we should probably introduce in this area though is that articles which do not provide any references should be speedy deletions. Now there are probably a whole lot of good articles out there right now which would fit that, so for now let's make the CSD criterion only for articles caught in the first 48 hours. And let's require the user who created the article to be informed of the deletion on her talk page.
Now this, while a rather draconian policy, is at least not inimical to the nature of Wikipedia, as AfD is. Of course, I'd rather that people be expected to make a good-faith effort to find a reference before deleting.
I really would like the software to make referencing easier.
Again, I think that having the edit summary be mandatory for non-minor edits would be a very good idea.
On 12/13/05, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/11/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
One thing we should probably introduce in this area though is that articles which do not provide any references should be speedy deletions. Now there are probably a whole lot of good articles out there right now which would fit that, so for now let's make the CSD criterion only for articles caught in the first 48 hours.
Now this, while a rather draconian policy, is at least not inimical to the nature of Wikipedia, as AfD is. Of course, I'd rather that people be expected to make a good-faith effort to find a reference before deleting.
I think this is something that we need collaboration for. A page upon which articles that don't contain any references at all can be placed. If references are added they can be removed from the page. If they stay there for a month or so, they may be deleted. No limits on article age would be needed.
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/11/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
One thing we should probably introduce in this area though is that articles which do not provide any references should be speedy deletions. Now there are probably a whole lot of good articles out there right now which would fit that, so for now let's make the CSD criterion only for articles caught in the first 48 hours.
Now this, while a rather draconian policy, is at least not inimical to the nature of Wikipedia, as AfD is. Of course, I'd rather that people be expected to make a good-faith effort to find a reference before deleting.
I think this is something that we need collaboration for. A page upon which articles that don't contain any references at all can be placed. If references are added they can be removed from the page. If they stay there for a month or so, they may be deleted. No limits on article age would be needed.
My only hesitation here is that I don't think there are very many valid articles in Wikipedia for which finding a reference is not very easy. For those few articles in that category, I don't see the harm in *requiring* that they be referenced *before* they are added (by the author, or they could even be put on the new "Articles for Creation").
If articles are given a month to get references, I believe that is only going to make the page grow bigger and more unmanageable. This is especially true because the number of new articles in a day is only going to go up, not down. If we can't reference them faster than we add them, the process will fail regardless of whether there is a month or a day to complete it. In fact, it will probably only fail harder because there will be more people wasting time trying to reference those articles which can't be referenced.
At least a month is better than forever, but I think a month is too long to be manageable.
How about this: we list pages there for a month, but after 24 hours the article gets moved to the user's subpage. And let's add this: an article doesn't get moved, even after 24 hours, unless a member of the "article referencing team" (or whatever) says that s/he has spent a few minutes looking for a source and failed. If no one bothers to make a good faith search effort, the article stays in article space for up to a month.
Anthony
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
At least a month is better than forever, but I think a month is too long to be manageable.
I believe it's about the same amount of time we give suspected copyright infringements.
How about this: we list pages there for a month, but after 24 hours the article gets moved to the user's subpage. And let's add this: an article doesn't get moved, even after 24 hours, unless a member of the "article referencing team" (or whatever) says that s/he has spent a few minutes looking for a source and failed. If no one bothers to make a good faith search effort, the article stays in article space for up to a month.
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
At least a month is better than forever, but I think a month is too long to be manageable.
I believe it's about the same amount of time we give suspected copyright infringements.
It isn't meant to be.
-- geni
Justin Cormack wrote:
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
Thats much better.
When do we start?
Justinc
I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on citing sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't really have much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and [[double-decker bus]]) don't have references yet (AFAIK).
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:41 +0800, John Lee wrote:
I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on citing sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't really have much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and [[double-decker bus]]) don't have references yet (AFAIK).
Well lets start putting it in more.
Yes, things with little interest are an issue.
I think I will have to make full list of articles I am interested in being good that I have contributed to, and prune my watchlist of the stuff that I just made small fixes to and dont really care about in order to make this improvement thing work.
I might however have a few erudite references for chicken nugget in my large pile of history of food books.
Justinc
On 12/13/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:41 +0800, John Lee wrote:
I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on citing sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't really have much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and [[double-decker bus]]) don't have references yet (AFAIK).
Well lets start putting it in more.
Yes, things with little interest are an issue.
I think I will have to make full list of articles I am interested in being good that I have contributed to, and prune my watchlist of the stuff that I just made small fixes to and dont really care about in order to make this improvement thing work.
I might however have a few erudite references for chicken nugget in my large pile of history of food books.
Justinc
A quick Google Print search reveals that Poultry Products Processing by Shabtai Barbut has a description of the process of chicken nugget production, complete with schematic overview, starting on page 291. In all there are 73 results mentioning "chicken nugget".
Anthony
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 11:49 -0500, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I might however have a few erudite references for chicken nugget in my large pile of history of food books.
Justinc
A quick Google Print search reveals that Poultry Products Processing by Shabtai Barbut has a description of the process of chicken nugget production, complete with schematic overview, starting on page 291. In all there are 73 results mentioning "chicken nugget".
Ah no doubt somewhere there are the right references. Or maybe the book sitting on top of my pile...
j
Justin Cormack wrote:
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:41 +0800, John Lee wrote:
I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on citing sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't really have much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and [[double-decker bus]]) don't have references yet (AFAIK).
Well lets start putting it in more.
Yes, things with little interest are an issue.
I think I will have to make full list of articles I am interested in being good that I have contributed to, and prune my watchlist of the stuff that I just made small fixes to and dont really care about in order to make this improvement thing work.
I might however have a few erudite references for chicken nugget in my large pile of history of food books.
I wonder how many people hold off adding references because they're hoping for a better source. For instance, I used to not mention using Oxford Classical Dictionary, because it's technically a tertiary source, but many of its articles mention only primary sources, leaving no secondaries to cite. Nowadays I just cite it anyway - if somebody has something better later, they can replace the OCD cite.
Stan
On 12/13/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I wonder how many people hold off adding references because they're hoping for a better source. For instance, I used to not mention using Oxford Classical Dictionary, because it's technically a tertiary source, but many of its articles mention only primary sources, leaving no secondaries to cite. Nowadays I just cite it anyway - if somebody has something better later, they can replace the OCD cite.
Exactly the result I feared when people started to press not only for sources, but only sources that fit certain criteria. I argued then that even a poor source is better than none, because it traces where the information came from and allows people familiar with the subject to dig deeper.
I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources, whichever is available. In the case of primary sources, of course, these should only be readily available ones. Ideally, an encyclopedia is a tertiary source - a summing-up of knowledgable opinion - but I would not exclude primary or tertiary sources unless better are available.
-Matt
Matt Brown wrote:
I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources, whichever is available. In the case of primary sources, of course, these should only be readily available ones.
Please don't say so out loud, some dickhead will start nominating for deletion anything with a source he can't google.
- d.
On 12/14/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources, whichever is available. In the case of primary sources, of course, these should only be readily available ones.
Please don't say so out loud, some dickhead will start nominating for deletion anything with a source he can't google.
I'm waiting for someone to try and use WP:NOR to argue for the deletion of most of our pages on fictional characters.
-- geni
Matt Brown wrote:
On 12/13/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
I wonder how many people hold off adding references because they're hoping for a better source. For instance, I used to not mention using Oxford Classical Dictionary, because it's technically a tertiary source, but many of its articles mention only primary sources, leaving no secondaries to cite. Nowadays I just cite it anyway - if somebody has something better later, they can replace the OCD cite.
Exactly the result I feared when people started to press not only for sources, but only sources that fit certain criteria. I argued then that even a poor source is better than none, because it traces where the information came from and allows people familiar with the subject to dig deeper.
I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources, whichever is available. In the case of primary sources, of course, these should only be readily available ones. Ideally, an encyclopedia is a tertiary source - a summing-up of knowledgable opinion - but I would not exclude primary or tertiary sources unless better are available.
I absolutely agree. Once you start imposing serious limitations on the acceptability of sources you set up the basis for many future arguments of the "my source is better than yours" variety. We need to encourage people to use what they have, without worrying about strict criteria.
Ec
G'day Ray,
<snip />
I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources, whichever is available. In the case of primary sources, of course, these should only be readily available ones. Ideally, an encyclopedia is a tertiary source - a summing-up of knowledgable opinion - but I would not exclude primary or tertiary sources unless better are available.
I absolutely agree. Once you start imposing serious limitations on the acceptability of sources you set up the basis for many future arguments of the "my source is better than yours" variety. We need to encourage people to use what they have, without worrying about strict criteria.
That depends on what you mean by "limitations". "You can't use the subject's autobiography, wait until you can get a two-page treatment from a textbook" is kinda silly and limiting. However, there already are very significant limitations: we aren't allowed to rely on the ravings of madmen to build a case. Translated into NPOV, this means that the followers of Lyndon LaRouche are no longer allowed to use wacko LaRouchite propaganda to claim he's more important than he really is.
I support this (well, nobody's asked me, but ...), and I imagine you do too if you've any knowledge about LaRouche, his movement and its followers, and the sort of material he prints.
Mark Gallagher wrote:
I also believe we should cite primary, secondary or tertiary sources, whichever is available. In the case of primary sources, of course, these should only be readily available ones. Ideally, an encyclopedia is a tertiary source - a summing-up of knowledgable opinion - but I would not exclude primary or tertiary sources unless better are available.
I absolutely agree. Once you start imposing serious limitations on the acceptability of sources you set up the basis for many future arguments of the "my source is better than yours" variety. We need to encourage people to use what they have, without worrying about strict criteria.
That depends on what you mean by "limitations". "You can't use the subject's autobiography, wait until you can get a two-page treatment from a textbook" is kinda silly and limiting. However, there already are very significant limitations: we aren't allowed to rely on the ravings of madmen to build a case. Translated into NPOV, this means that the followers of Lyndon LaRouche are no longer allowed to use wacko LaRouchite propaganda to claim he's more important than he really is.
I support this (well, nobody's asked me, but ...), and I imagine you do too if you've any knowledge about LaRouche, his movement and its followers, and the sort of material he prints.
The usefulness of a source depends on what you are using it for. As wacko as LaRouche writings may be, if he writes about a rant that he gave in Akron on some specified day it is prima facie evidence that he was in Akron on that day without an implications about the value of his speech.
Ec
Stan Shebs wrote:
Justin Cormack wrote:
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:41 +0800, John Lee wrote:
I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on citing sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't really have much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and [[double-decker bus]]) don't have references yet (AFAIK).
Well lets start putting it in more.
Yes, things with little interest are an issue.
I think I will have to make full list of articles I am interested in being good that I have contributed to, and prune my watchlist of the stuff that I just made small fixes to and dont really care about in order to make this improvement thing work.
I might however have a few erudite references for chicken nugget in my large pile of history of food books.
I wonder how many people hold off adding references because they're hoping for a better source. For instance, I used to not mention using Oxford Classical Dictionary, because it's technically a tertiary source, but many of its articles mention only primary sources, leaving no secondaries to cite. Nowadays I just cite it anyway - if somebody has something better later, they can replace the OCD cite.
Stan
I always cite any possible source - even tertiary ones. They're better than nothing at all, and when someone with a better source comes along, they can be replaced.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
On 12/13/05, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
I always cite any possible source - even tertiary ones. They're better than nothing at all, and when someone with a better source comes along, they can be replaced.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Not only is a tertiary source better than no source, but the link to a tertiary source may lead a future editor to dig further and find a better source.
Keith ([[User:Keithlaw]])
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 21:41 +0800, John Lee wrote:
I believe the {{unreferenced}} template already exists. I've seen it quite a few times, but not often enough, IMO. I'm a fanatic on citing sources, but some of the old ones I started that I don't really have much interest in (like [[chicken nugget]] and [[double-decker bus]]) don't have references yet (AFAIK).
[[:Category:Articles lacking sources]] does indeed get filled from {{unreferenced}} - just checked. Theres lots in it already, even if there should be much more.
Lots of moderately good stuff doesnt have refs eg [[Barbara Hepworth]].
Justinc
Justin Cormack wrote:
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
Thats much better. When do we start?
Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the habit until people get the idea about these things.
Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the operator to press the button on.
- d.
On 12/14/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Justin Cormack wrote:
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
Thats much better. When do we start?
Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the habit until people get the idea about these things.
Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the operator to press the button on.
And the first editor, and the last three editors, get a message on their talk pages? I'd go with that.
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 12/14/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the habit until people get the idea about these things. Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the operator to press the button on.
And the first editor, and the last three editors, get a message on their talk pages? I'd go with that.
Bot-posted talk page messages are ill favoured. I think the last one was Ram-man's about asking people to CC their contributions to Rambot US place articles.
- d.
On Wed, 14 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Justin Cormack wrote:
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 13:24 +0000, Tony Sidaway wrote:
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
Thats much better. When do we start?
Whenever you hit "Random page" and get an article with no references and no external links that isn't a stub. That's how I do it! Get in the habit until people get the idea about these things.
Heck, it strikes me as eminently bot-assistable - no external links, no word "References" or "Sources", no stub message, flag it for the operator to press the button on.
There's a couple of glitches with that approach.
One is that you'll end up mislabelling a lot of my articles: my choice of terms has been "Bibliography" (which I used at first) & "Notes".
Another is that you'll miss one sneaky misuse of the concept of "citing sources": for some articles, an editor will mention several authors & describe their POVs in the article -- only to omit any information that would help to identify their writings in the section marked "References" "Notes" or "Some Books I found on Amazon that Might Have Some Relevence to This Article". The way the letter of this requirement is followed (but the spirit is kicked in the groin to keep out of the way) makes this section less useful had no sources been provided.
Geoff
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
At least a month is better than forever, but I think a month is too long to be manageable.
I believe it's about the same amount of time we give suspected copyright infringements.
Suspected copyright infringements is a completely different situation, though, because it invariably *requires* discussion. That something is not a copyright infringement cannot be easily proven, if at all. That something has a citation in it can be easily proven.
How about this: we list pages there for a month, but after 24 hours the article gets moved to the user's subpage. And let's add this: an article doesn't get moved, even after 24 hours, unless a member of the "article referencing team" (or whatever) says that s/he has spent a few minutes looking for a source and failed. If no one bothers to make a good faith search effort, the article stays in article space for up to a month.
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
I find the unreferenced tag to be useless. Either it says that the article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts with the opposite tag, or it says that the article contains zero references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article anyway.
If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object. But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.
Anthony
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
At least a month is better than forever, but I think a month is too long to be manageable.
I believe it's about the same amount of time we give suspected copyright infringements.
Suspected copyright infringements is a completely different situation, though, because it invariably *requires* discussion. That something is not a copyright infringement cannot be easily proven, if at all. That something has a citation in it can be easily proven.
That isn't the right question. It's not whether somehting is *verified*, it's whether it's *verifiable*. It's wiki. Lack of references (as in the very earliest version of the article Oxygen, see the addendum to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oxygen&oldid=271622) can be solved by editing. It can never be solved by deletion, which should be reserved for articles that seem, after an honest effort has failed, to be unverifiable.
How about this: we list pages there for a month, but after 24 hours the article gets moved to the user's subpage. And let's add this: an article doesn't get moved, even after 24 hours, unless a member of the "article referencing team" (or whatever) says that s/he has spent a few minutes looking for a source and failed. If no one bothers to make a good faith search effort, the article stays in article space for up to a month.
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
I find the unreferenced tag to be useless. Either it says that the article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts with the opposite tag, or it says that the article contains zero references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article anyway.
If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object. But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.
Anthony _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
At least a month is better than forever, but I think a month is too long to be manageable.
I believe it's about the same amount of time we give suspected copyright infringements.
Suspected copyright infringements is a completely different situation, though, because it invariably *requires* discussion. That something is not a copyright infringement cannot be easily proven, if at all. That something has a citation in it can be easily proven.
That isn't the right question. It's not whether somehting is *verified*, it's whether it's *verifiable*.
In my mind verifiable, as used in Wikipedia, implies that it is easily verifiable. If something is asserted without providing any source, and a quick good faith effort to find a source fails, I'd say verifiability has failed.
"The burden of evidence lies with the editor who has made the edit." - [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]]
It's wiki. Lack of references (as in the very earliest version of the article Oxygen, see the addendum to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oxygen&oldid=271622) can be solved by editing. It can never be solved by deletion, which should be reserved for articles that seem, after an honest effort has failed, to be unverifiable.
My latest proposal suggested that articles were merely moved to the user namespace, 24 hours after creation, and only after the user was notified and a good faith effort to locate a source had failed.
How about this: we list pages there for a month, but after 24 hours the article gets moved to the user's subpage. And let's add this: an article doesn't get moved, even after 24 hours, unless a member of the "article referencing team" (or whatever) says that s/he has spent a few minutes looking for a source and failed. If no one bothers to make a good faith search effort, the article stays in article space for up to a month.
No need to userfy. Just add an "unreferenced" tag. This has the advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the article.
I find the unreferenced tag to be useless. Either it says that the article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts with the opposite tag, or it says that the article contains zero references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article anyway.
If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object. But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.
Anthony _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
My latest proposal suggested that articles were merely moved to the user namespace, 24 hours after creation, and only after the user was notified and a good faith effort to locate a source had failed.
This should read "24 hours after tagging". And I should also point out that this would only apply to articles were tagged within 48 hours of creation. Older articles need to be dealt with more cautiously, because the author didn't know about the rule ahead of time. Maybe we could focus on 10 of these per day, for instance.
Anthony
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
My latest proposal suggested that articles were merely moved to the user namespace, 24 hours after creation, and only after the user was notified and a good faith effort to locate a source had failed.
The problem with that is that it removes articles that need work from the eyes of the editors and readers who might be able to fix the problem. Better to mark it as unreliable than make it invisible.
-Matt
On 12/13/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
My latest proposal suggested that articles were merely moved to the user namespace, 24 hours after creation, and only after the user was notified and a good faith effort to locate a source had failed.
The problem with that is that it removes articles that need work from the eyes of the editors and readers who might be able to fix the problem. Better to mark it as unreliable than make it invisible.
-Matt
It doesn't make them invisible, it makes them less prominent. Yes, it might cause a few articles to stay missing for longer than they have to. I admit the proposal is not without some negatives. I just believe the positives far outweigh these negatives (and I'm not going to repeat those positives, look above in the thread for them).
I will repeat that marking certain articles as unreliable is a bad idea, because it implies that articles which aren't marked that way are reliable. If you want to tell readers about the reliability of Wikipedia, just put a note about it at the top of *every* article. Marking the fact that certain articles have no sources makes no sense, as this fact is evident to anyone who scans the article and sees that there are no sources.
Anthony
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
In my mind verifiable, as used in Wikipedia, implies that it is easily verifiable.
I have to disagree, for most applicable meanings of "easily". I can verify lots of stuff by going down to my son's college library; if I cite a review paper in Nature or a graduate-level textbook, odds are the average joe won't be able to just click on Google and find a reliable verification, and his local reference library probably won't carry it.
If something is asserted without providing any source, and a quick good faith effort to find a source fails, I'd say verifiability has failed.
Well at the moment we've got some editors openly defending the practice of deleting without *any* good faith search, so this is an improvement.
My latest proposal suggested that articles were merely moved to the user namespace, 24 hours after creation, and only after the user was notified and a good faith effort to locate a source had failed.
Leaving it in main namespace with a notice is better because the article may still be useful, and if it's accessible it may be edited to add references. I don't see what good is done by moving to a user namespace.
On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
In my mind verifiable, as used in Wikipedia, implies that it is easily verifiable.
I have to disagree, for most applicable meanings of "easily". I can verify lots of stuff by going down to my son's college library; if I cite a review paper in Nature or a graduate-level textbook, odds are the average joe won't be able to just click on Google and find a reliable verification, and his local reference library probably won't carry it.
I'd say that qualifies as easily verifiable, as long as you cite the source. And as for the graduate-level textbooks, I'd say the vast majority of the information in them *is* available in Google Print.
If something is asserted without providing any source, and a quick good faith effort to find a source fails, I'd say verifiability has failed.
Well at the moment we've got some editors openly defending the practice of deleting without *any* good faith search, so this is an improvement.
I'd defend that practice in the case of an article which didn't even bother providing a source. But I think a good compromise is to allow admins to tag the article, let a second person make the good faith effort, and let a third person delete it. These could be the same person, or different people.
My latest proposal suggested that articles were merely moved to the user namespace, 24 hours after creation, and only after the user was notified and a good faith effort to locate a source had failed.
Leaving it in main namespace with a notice is better because the article may still be useful, and if it's accessible it may be edited to add references. I don't see what good is done by moving to a user namespace.
It provides extra incentive to add references. It makes it more clear that the article is not acceptable as part of our mainstream content. It takes it out of mirrors like that of Answers Corporation, which don't mirror the user namespace. And I believe it makes it ineligible for that waste of time called AFD.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I find the unreferenced tag to be useless. Either it says that the article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts with the opposite tag,
Then it shouldn't be used to tag the article. That's not what it's for.
or it says that the article contains zero references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article anyway.
The tag puts the article in the category. It also looks like a big ugly box telling the editor "PLEASE DO BETTER KTHX."
If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object. But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.
I suggest that we can only lead by example and peer pressure, and the template does IMO help there.
- d.
On 12/13/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I find the unreferenced tag to be useless. Either it says that the article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts with the opposite tag,
Then it shouldn't be used to tag the article. That's not what it's for.
This could certainly be made more clear. Right now it's on the top of [[Homosexuality and Christianity]], which was the first one I checked.
(Maybe I should add a tag which says "This article has a tag on it which isn't appropriate. You can help Wikipedia by removing the tag.")
or it says that the article contains zero references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article anyway.
The tag puts the article in the category. It also looks like a big ugly box telling the editor "PLEASE DO BETTER KTHX."
I can think of ways to make the template even uglier, if that really is the point of it.
If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object. But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.
I suggest that we can only lead by example and peer pressure, and the template does IMO help there.
- d.
I guess you're saying the template has been a success. I sure haven't seen this.
Anthony
David Gerard wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I find the unreferenced tag to be useless. Either it says that the article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts with the opposite tag,
Then it shouldn't be used to tag the article. That's not what it's for.
or it says that the article contains zero references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article anyway.
The tag puts the article in the category. It also looks like a big ugly box telling the editor "PLEASE DO BETTER KTHX."
If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object. But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.
I suggest that we can only lead by example and peer pressure, and the template does IMO help there.
The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an unreferenced article. Is it deletion or improvement? I would easily support improvement. If an article is unreferenced that does not imply that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes and needless stress. In planning new strategies this should be considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress. Without that this will be no different from AfD.
Ec
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an unreferenced article. Is it deletion or improvement? I would easily support improvement. If an article is unreferenced that does not imply that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
There's no question over the endgame. The question is over what to do in the meantime. If we don't know whether or not something is right, it shouldn't be in an article. Doesn't mean it can't be in user space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted articles history. That's my interpretation of [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.
Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes and needless stress. In planning new strategies this should be considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress. Without that this will be no different from AfD.
Ec
The endgame in either case is a well referenced article. The question is how do we get there.
Anthony
There's a problem with AfD (actually, there are many, not least of which is people ignoring policy, but let me focus on this one). It's very hard to achieve consensus. We're currently in the bizarre situation in which opinion is divided over whether to delete or merge, and as a result neither is done, and an appalling article remains.
I believe that the problem is due to the three available options, and I believe that there may be a solution: always express a first and second choice.
Where there's a clear consensus on first choices, ignore second choices. Otherwise, look at first and second choices together.
I recognise that this treats AfD as a vote, while for some reason that is seen as a bad thing, but at least it would be an improvement.
It may be a stupid idea, but I wonder what people think?
Jakew
Jake Waskett wrote:
There's a problem with AfD (actually, there are many, not least of which is people ignoring policy, but let me focus on this one). It's very hard to achieve consensus. We're currently in the bizarre situation in which opinion is divided over whether to delete or merge, and as a result neither is done, and an appalling article remains.
<snip>
Jakew
Huh? That defaults to keep? Not in my book. Whenever I come across such a debate, I tend to merge whatever salvageable content I can and redirect the article. You don't need consensus on AfD to merge or keep. Only to delete.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an unreferenced article. Is it deletion or improvement? I would easily support improvement. If an article is unreferenced that does not imply that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
There's no question over the endgame. The question is over what to do in the meantime. If we don't know whether or not something is right, it shouldn't be in an article. Doesn't mean it can't be in user space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted articles history. That's my interpretation of [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.
We can begin with some kind of "unreferenced" tag, maybe even a flashing red "CAUTION" sign. :-) Beyond that, we need to remember that most of our non-referenced facts aren't controversial at all. Look at how long it has taken to put category tags on all articles. That's a much simpler task than referencing. Of your four suggestions only putting material on the article's talk page will even give a sporting chance for review. If you outright delete an unreferenced article there will not even be a link to Xxxx's talk page so that the material can be reviewed and documented. Have fun finding it!
Assuming good faith needs to be extended to the articles themselves. It recognizes that a contributor who was himself deceived by the information was probably acting in good faith. Fact checking an article is a tedious process that needs to apply to every statement in an article. It may be easy enogu to have a bot tag every unreferenced article with a notice that if it is not referenced in 24 hours it will be deleted. If ALL of us were to devote ourselves to that task for that 24 hours without sleeping there would still not be enough of us for the job. So when your second bot comes along and clears out the still referenced articles what would we have left? We need common sense, not impatience.
Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes and needless stress. In planning new strategies this should be considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress. Without that this will be no different from AfD.
Ec
The endgame in either case is a well referenced article. The question is how do we get there.
Of course, but we can't depend on any kind of quick fix.
Ec
I find it hard to believe that you read anything that I actually said. You've completely misrepresented my points in two substantial ways. 1) You talk about "non-referenced facts", while I am talking about non-referenced articles. Not just facts that don't have sources, entire articles without a single reference to anything outside the encyclopedia. 2) You talk about how it's impossible for us to fix "every unreferenced article" within 24 hours. But I am not talking about *old* unreferenced articles, I'm talking about *new ones*. Fixing all the unreferenced articles we currently have will be hard, and it will take a long time. But we'll never get finished if we keep creating new ones.
This isn't a quick fix. It's the first step in a long process.
Anthony
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an unreferenced article. Is it deletion or improvement? I would easily support improvement. If an article is unreferenced that does not imply that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
There's no question over the endgame. The question is over what to do in the meantime. If we don't know whether or not something is right, it shouldn't be in an article. Doesn't mean it can't be in user space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted articles history. That's my interpretation of [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.
We can begin with some kind of "unreferenced" tag, maybe even a flashing red "CAUTION" sign. :-) Beyond that, we need to remember that most of our non-referenced facts aren't controversial at all. Look at how long it has taken to put category tags on all articles. That's a much simpler task than referencing. Of your four suggestions only putting material on the article's talk page will even give a sporting chance for review. If you outright delete an unreferenced article there will not even be a link to Xxxx's talk page so that the material can be reviewed and documented. Have fun finding it!
Assuming good faith needs to be extended to the articles themselves. It recognizes that a contributor who was himself deceived by the information was probably acting in good faith. Fact checking an article is a tedious process that needs to apply to every statement in an article. It may be easy enogu to have a bot tag every unreferenced article with a notice that if it is not referenced in 24 hours it will be deleted. If ALL of us were to devote ourselves to that task for that 24 hours without sleeping there would still not be enough of us for the job. So when your second bot comes along and clears out the still referenced articles what would we have left? We need common sense, not impatience.
Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes and needless stress. In planning new strategies this should be considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress. Without that this will be no different from AfD.
Ec
The endgame in either case is a well referenced article. The question is how do we get there.
Of course, but we can't depend on any kind of quick fix.
Ec
It sounds like your sensitivity on this is a little over the top. 1) I don't see the point of playing semantic games between facts and articles. Any article bigger than a sub-stub is going to be composed of a series of facts or alleged facts. So whatever ... 2) You're the one that suggested the 24 hour period before deleting. Even AfD allows 5 days; you're proposing to make this an even bigger fuck-up. If these articles absolutely have to be deleted instead of being fixed, a month would be a more reasonable period. For those who don't spend a lot of time on their editing a 24-hour period is a joke.
Ec
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I find it hard to believe that you read anything that I actually said. You've completely misrepresented my points in two substantial ways.
- You talk about "non-referenced facts", while I am talking about
non-referenced articles. Not just facts that don't have sources, entire articles without a single reference to anything outside the encyclopedia. 2) You talk about how it's impossible for us to fix "every unreferenced article" within 24 hours. But I am not talking about *old* unreferenced articles, I'm talking about *new ones*. Fixing all the unreferenced articles we currently have will be hard, and it will take a long time. But we'll never get finished if we keep creating new ones.
This isn't a quick fix. It's the first step in a long process.
Anthony
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an unreferenced article. Is it deletion or improvement? I would easily support improvement. If an article is unreferenced that does not imply that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
There's no question over the endgame. The question is over what to do in the meantime. If we don't know whether or not something is right, it shouldn't be in an article. Doesn't mean it can't be in user space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted articles history. That's my interpretation of [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.
We can begin with some kind of "unreferenced" tag, maybe even a flashing red "CAUTION" sign. :-) Beyond that, we need to remember that most of our non-referenced facts aren't controversial at all. Look at how long it has taken to put category tags on all articles. That's a much simpler task than referencing. Of your four suggestions only putting material on the article's talk page will even give a sporting chance for review. If you outright delete an unreferenced article there will not even be a link to Xxxx's talk page so that the material can be reviewed and documented. Have fun finding it!
Assuming good faith needs to be extended to the articles themselves. It recognizes that a contributor who was himself deceived by the information was probably acting in good faith. Fact checking an article is a tedious process that needs to apply to every statement in an article. It may be easy enogu to have a bot tag every unreferenced article with a notice that if it is not referenced in 24 hours it will be deleted. If ALL of us were to devote ourselves to that task for that 24 hours without sleeping there would still not be enough of us for the job. So when your second bot comes along and clears out the still referenced articles what would we have left? We need common sense, not impatience.
Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes and needless stress. In planning new strategies this should be considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress. Without that this will be no different from AfD.
Ec
The endgame in either case is a well referenced article. The question is how do we get there.
Of course, but we can't depend on any kind of quick fix.
Ec
On 12/16/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
It sounds like your sensitivity on this is a little over the top. 1) I don't see the point of playing semantic games between facts and articles. Any article bigger than a sub-stub is going to be composed of a series of facts or alleged facts. So whatever ...
The difference between removing all unreferenced facts and removing all unreferenced articles is a huge one, and it is more than just semantics. Yes, articles consist of facts, but not all unreferenced facts are in an unreferenced article.
2) You're the one that suggested the 24 hour period beforedeleting. Even AfD allows 5 days; you're proposing to make this an even bigger fuck-up. If these articles absolutely have to be deleted instead of being fixed, a month would be a more reasonable period. For those who don't spend a lot of time on their editing a 24-hour period is a joke.
Ec
That wasn't my point. Try reading what I said again. Take a few breaths first. Read all the sentences. Don't just look at the number 24 and then start ranting.
This would only apply to brand new articles. And the time you have to add a single reference is unlimited. The article would simply be deleted (or moved somewhere) in the mean time. 24 hours is plenty of time for one person to find one source for all but the most obscure of topics. For those obscure topics the burden of proof should be on the article creator, not on the rest of us.
Alternatively, look at it this way. If we are creating new articles so quickly that we don't have time to find a single source for each one, then we should slow down new article creation and beef up on quality control.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I find it hard to believe that you read anything that I actually said. You've completely misrepresented my points in two substantial ways.
- You talk about "non-referenced facts", while I am talking about
non-referenced articles. Not just facts that don't have sources, entire articles without a single reference to anything outside the encyclopedia. 2) You talk about how it's impossible for us to fix "every unreferenced article" within 24 hours. But I am not talking about *old* unreferenced articles, I'm talking about *new ones*. Fixing all the unreferenced articles we currently have will be hard, and it will take a long time. But we'll never get finished if we keep creating new ones.
This isn't a quick fix. It's the first step in a long process.
Anthony