This is what people may actually do, and it of course
makes a farce of
the whole thing. At that level of referencing, I could probably do
about 50 an hour, on any subject about which books have been written,
With one approach, I do not need a library or even Google: Looking at
Category:Articles_lacking_sources for July 06, I find Alpinist Unit.
Its a unit of the IDF, I go tho the Israeli Defense Forces article, a
general book is listed, I copy the reference. Should take about 30
seconds. I then go to the category for IDF, and add the same reference
to each of them.
At the next level up, using another approach, I take a recent
biochemistry textbook, and I go through it systematically, adding a
ref for every term I encounter that has a WP article. (I could even
put in page numbers),
(most in that subject will have a ref, however, but I could do the
same with a History of English Literature.)
I could do it even more efficiently: I search for "unreferenced
biology", take a suitable advanced encyclopedia, and ...
With a good semi automatic bot, using online sources only, I could
probably do it two times as fast. It could even be completely
automated after selected the book.
But who does this help? Anyone reading the article can do this just as
well when reading it. If I am to put in the best readily available
good references for each article at an appropriate level of
specificity, that's another matter.
On 6/19/07, Chris Lüer <chris(a)zandria.net> wrote:
At 02:58 PM 6/19/2007, Eugene van der Pijll
wrote:
Eliminating unreferenced articles does not mean
finding sources for
every fact. It just needs one for each article.
And if you really cannot find a single reference, just merge the content
into a related article and redirect the original. No loss of
information, and it's now in a referenced article, so it will not be
deleted.
Until someone starts the Elimination of Unreferenced Sentences Drive... ;)
Chris
--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
I could simply add my botany book as a reference to almost any general
article on botany, and many higher taxa organism articles, but it
doesn't make it a reference to that article.
I don't think adding references to articles that aren't really
references to that article is an improvement over unreferenced
articles. This is an area where editors can be rather set: they think
the reference says what they see, but it doesn't, yet they want to
keep the reference in the article.
I had one editor cite 3 sources that didn't say what he claimed, and
he was not letting any of them or his statement go.
Let's not encourage this!
KP