New subject: Handling unreferenced but likely-valid material

6 Dec 2006


      Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 10:49:01 -0600 (CST)
From: "Jeff Raymond" jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Handling unreferenced but likely-valid
    material
To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org
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4588.63.151.8.141.1165423741.squirrel@www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
    
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"Jeff Raymond" jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
...
In the spirit of this, I did my own Special:Random sample of 30.  I found:
Unsourced: 13
1 Working External link/reference: 6
Printed only: 2
Multiple References: 8
Of the 13 unsourced articles, 3 were lists (and I didn't check the
articles they were linking to for sources) 9 stubs, and only one was a
full-blown article lacking sourcing.  I may be in a minority on this one,
but I find unsourced stubs much less problematic than unsourced
''articles'', so my personal findings gave me a lot more hope than I
thought.
-Jeff
Well, this was an interesting exercise. Out of a sample of 25 consecutive
random articles:
9 had no sources whatsoever (well, one linked to a youtube video, but that
is equivalent to no source at all)
2 I felt were *very* weakly sourced -- one fairly long article on a
proprietary treatment listed only a self-published web site and an article
of "research" published in an unrefereed journal--the other had a single
link that did not provide any support for most of the article
9 were weakly sourced, in that I had little confidence that it would be able
to verify more than a small fraction of the content with only the sources
provided
4 appeared to be moderately well-sourced, in that there were multiple
sources provided and reasonable confidence that much, if not all, of the
content could be verified from the provided sources
Only 1 was really well-sourced, in that I had a pretty high confidence that
nearly every detail in the article could be verified with the provided
sources.
So 9/25 (36%) is unsourced or 44% if you include the very weakly sourced.
Of the 25, 11 were marked as stubs (a couple of the others probably
qualified as stubs, possibly even for deletion). If we exclude the marked
stubs, 4 remaining had no sources or 4/14 (29%).
I any case, no support for the 80% unsourced cannard.
Bkonrad

Re: [WikiEN-l] Handling unreferenced but likely-valid material