Ray Saintonge saintonge at telus.net wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Nowadays I pretty much tell new contributors "just write a few paragraphs and INCLUDE REFERENCES and don't worry about the fancy markup for now. Just INCLUDE THE REFERENCES and people will know it's a real article about a real thing."
Absolutely! Speaking as the one who has been pushing the POV on Wiktionary that even vocabulary needs to be referenced, I am amazed by the people who consider some number of Google hits as evidence. Some of the most common offending terms are those that seek to rename sexual practices, or characterize some kind of on-line activity. A large proportion of these terms may indeed be valid, but that requires some kind of documentation to distinguish them from something that the contributor just made up for the occasion.
I've just edited [[Wikipedia:Your first article]] accordingly.
By the way, that page was UNRELENTINGLY negative before I did. Jeez, we want to *encourage* good new editors. And it needs a severe tightening of the writing. It's a perfect example of instruction creep. Could a good writer please hack it up?
- d.