On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 11:05 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Spot on. Now, comes a writer and creates that
thing of beauty, and it
is concise and precise and all that. Took hours to boil it down to
that. Oh, the writer didn't source it. The writer knew the subject
very well and simply wrote about what the writer knows. And, the
writer knows, anyone else who knows this subject will recognize the
accuracy of this. I'm not talking about someone simply asserting their own POV.
Used to be, this article might sit there, unsourced for years.
Nowadays, five minutes, speedy deletion tag. "Fails to assert
notability." "No sources."
The ladder that built the project is being chopped away. There is
possibly help coming: flagged revisions. Once we have a means of
discriminating between checked and sourced and polished articles and
those which are perhaps better called "submissions," we might be able
to move beyond the whole deletionist/inclusionist madness. We might
be able to stop stepping on the seeds that could be fostered and
nourished with good editing. If we don't, somebody else will.
Well put. The
often cancerous obsession that some have for notability
and sourcing is as damaging to the future of Wikipedia as the sins that
they are trying to suppress. Admittedly biographies of living persons
require stricter guidelines, but they are an exception. If an article
in most subject areas is started without sources, or an assertion of
notability it's not a big deal. Somebody will add them eventually.
Ec
Bah! I heartily wish that so many good contributors didn't see
sourcing as a chore, perhaps even detrimental to their own ability to
contribute.
Since this thread seems to be going all over the place about article
quality generally, let me get up on my soapbox about why adding good
sources and sourcing as you write is important. Doing so:
* improves your own understanding of a topic, as you have to check
that you do, in fact, have the details right;
* helps point out gaps in the article, as more comprehensive works on
a topic will likely document aspects of a topic that you, as an
encyclopedist, have not yet considered or added to the article;
* helps provide balance to the article, as when doing research you may
come across points of view and aspects of a topic that you were
previously unfamiliar with (this also can be the intriguing and fun
part of adding to your own knowledge);
* improves the factual accuracy of the article (every time I sit down
to fully source an unreferenced article I find details that differ
from the aggregated published literature; this is not, I believe, an
artifact of the topics I pick, but a reflection of both the way that
articles tend to drift and that contributors may not always have
flawless memories);
* makes the article a better resource for the reader who may be
interested in finding out more about a topic or particular aspect of a
topic; also improves the reader's confidence in that article, and by
extension the entire project (cf. J.B. Murray's exhortation to his
[[WP:MMM]] students to only use sourced articles -- as a professor and
Wikipedia user, he is certainly not alone in using sourcing as a
metric of article quality);
* aids students and others who are just beginning to learn about a
topic, and are not yet familiar with the literature in a field (or the
literature in that language!) A good bibliography and reference list
will point out the seminal and comprehensive works in a field, as well
as pointing a reader to easily accessible documentation for facts;
* helps create a bibliographic record for that topic, which is just
one part of building a comprehensive reference resource;
* provides a starting place for other contributors who may want to
expand, copyedit, tighten, or otherwise improve the article (per
discussion in this thread).
Of course it is possible to write an okay article without listing your
sources, or consulting new ones. But it is *not* possible to write a
great article without doing so -- and we should all aspire to
greatness!
-- phoebe