On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 2:21 AM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 5/24/2008 1:50:47 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, refero.relata@gmail.com writes:

it will become more necessary to be careful, regardless of the heaviness of the burden.>>

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Yes and this burden sits directly on the shoulders of the writers, not the copyeditors.

Absolutely not. It is shared - and WP:CITE and WP:V are policy, not WP:MEWRITEPRETTY.

RR

At 04:51 PM 5/24/2008, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:

Yes and this burden sits directly on the shoulders of the writers, not the copyeditors.

Since this statement has been repeated, it wasn't some accident of wording. We won't build the project by identifying who is to blame. Good content is created by "writers" and "editors" working together. On Wikipedia, we are all, to some degree, writers and editors.

I personally find it very difficult, or, more accurately, tedious, to "write" and source at the same time. When I study a subject, I often do a lot of reading and writing, bouncing off of others, until the state of knowledge of the field is assimilated for me. Then I can truly write about it, usually in response to some specific need. What I write, if I'm being careful, is verifiable, but I don't add footnotes, because, though I know how I know what I know, usually, I don't have specific sources, page numbers, correct names of authors, URLs, etc., in mind. So I may add content off the top of my head, but my intention is that *all* of it is verifiable. What happens next depends on the motivations of other editors.

Here is what I do with the writing of others, assuming I'm familiar with the topic, and I tend not to do much editing of articles when I'm not familiar. If something is not sourced, but I think it is true and verifiable, and I have time, I'll add the source. I don't demand that the original author add it. I often don't know who that is, anyway, and Wikipedia doesn't have good tools to enable easy identification of who wrote what. I do not take out content that I believe is either correct, or editable to be correct. I might tag it for source if I don't have time to find it myself. On the other hand, if it I believe it to be incorrect, and it is unsourced, and it just doesn't belong in the article, I'll take it out.

There is no special burden on the original writer of material, but, in fact, it seems many editors think so, which is why I'm troubling to respond here. The burden of sourcing what is in Wikipedia is on *all* of us. The wiki process worked when people respected each other, and worked together to extend and clean it up. It is becoming more of an adversarial process. "Prove it or it's out, immediately," is, quite simply, AGF failure. That a writer put something in is prima facie evidence for it. Rebuttable, to be sure.

If I've put in something unsourced, on the other hand, and an editor takes it out, I've got no complaint against that editor, personally, if nobody then brings it back in with sourcing (including myself). But if we don't OWN articles, the flip side of this is that we don't have any personal responsibility for them. And when experts write for Wikipedia, they may not check watchlists every week. So they don't see AfDs, if anyone bothers to notify them. An expert has given serious time to create an article here, or to work on someone else's article, and then it is gone, with no notification, and for a non-Wikipedian, often no clue. All they know is that "someone" took it away. And then one more expert thinks that Wikipedia is worthless and a waste of time. And this is happening every day.