No, my argument is not spurious - it's to the point. We operate in a community, and there are plenty of things I would do differently too if I had my way with everything. There's zero point in pursuing proposals that are strongly opposed by a significant section of the community. "Majority" (50%+1) is not good enough for something as important as this. As another poster said: "Dont break the community". Flagged revisions and the increasing trend towards deletionism are the two developments that have the greatest risk of doing exactly that. ----- Original Message ----- From: "doc" <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, 31 March, 2009 23:45:19 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Flagged revs poll take 2 Your argument is spurious. It may well be that this proposal is the only one that would pass - but that neither means that it is good, nor that it is a good thing that it is passing. The proposal IMO is damaging to the cause of using flagged revisions in a manner that will help BLP victims. Doing nothing would be better than this. Your argument is the logical fallacy that because "something must be done" means "anything is better than the status quo", or that "any movement is a step in the right direction" - which does not consider that one can move, and move in the wrong direction. Andrew Turvey wrote: _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Is it perhaps time, that we started to demand that basic sourcing was a pre-requisite of creating an article on any living person? This proposal aims (without causing any deletion spree of backlogs) to instigate the idea that basic sourcing is necessary for any BLP to remain on wikipedia. People are given time to source it (and can even do so retrospectively) - but we set time limits on unreferenced BLPs. We've currently got 30,000 of these unreferenced things - that needs sorting (preferably by sourcing rather than deletion) - but stemming the tide is the first step. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Co…

Is it perhaps time, that we started to demand that basic sourcing was a pre-requisite of creating an article on any living person?

Is it perhaps time, that we started to demand that basic sourcing was a pre-requisite of creating an article on any living person?

2009/4/1 doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com>om>: Without commenting on this specific proposal, I thought it interesting that the de.wikipedia.org community implemented a fairly simple way to drive more sourcing on all articles: They made the edit summary field mandatory for new users, and have renamed it to "Summary and Sources", making it clear in lots of places that edits without sources aren't acceptable. If you look at anon recent-changes on de.wp, you'll notice that this has led to lots of people including URLs, etc., directly in their edit summaries. [1] This makes it at least a bit easier for other users to decide on whether the edit was legitimate. [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Letzte_%C3%84nderungen&am… - As an interesting side note, the mandatory summary script doesn't seem to trigger on section edits, and those are still very frequently unexplained.

I am all in favor of seeing if we can change people's behavior in subtle ways; it will take many solutions all working together to fix blp's. -- phoebe _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

phoebe ayers wrote: A very simple and non-controversial start might be to ask New Page patrolers, when they see a new unsourced BLP (or indeed any unsourced article) to put a polite message on the creator's talk page saying "Thanks for your article [XYZ]. Wikipedia asks that all material be verifiable from reliable sources, it is important that readers and other users can check what's been writen. You don't seem to have told us the source you used for this article. Please can you edit the article to indicate what the source is? (Click here for help if you don't know how.) Unsourced material about living people may be removed if challenged." That doesn't bite or threaten any newbies, although if established editors keep getting these on their talk pages, threats might be warranted.