On 4/21/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:

I guess the list shows that {{unreferenced}} is overused. Most of the articles on the list are not in the least problematic.

I sampled ten articles - 3331 through 3340, just because they happened to be at the top of a column.

1. [[Lauren Green]] - No References section, but four External Links, which seem to actually include many of the references used to write the article. A mention of her political leanings has been marked with {{fact}}, and someone added {{unreferenced}} later on despite the existence of external links that were probably really references. 2. [[Almir Imširević]] - Unsourced stub, categorized, nothing questionable in there. 3. [[Robin Byrd]] - External links to own website and IMDB, despite which it has been tagged {{unsourced}}. Definitely needs more detailed references. 4. [[Sandra Sully (journalist)]]. Sourced to IMDB and one other reference. Clearly insufficient compared to length of article. 5. [[Paul Patrick]]. Article contains some external links inline but no real references. Article seems to have been created by an acquaintance of the subject. 6. [[Hage Geingob]] - Completely unsourced, although seems a good article in other ways. 7. [[John Mayhew]] - contains two references despite the {{unreferenced}} tag. 8. [[Hans-Georg Schwarzenbeck]] - Unreferenced long stub/short article on this soccer player 9. [[Adrian Fenty]] - Contains an extensive number of references in the form of inline links, as well as a substantial External Links section. 10. [[Frank Monsalve]] - Contains one external link to his business, which contains a short biography; this is probably sufficient to source the content if not to establish notability.

So, out of ten articles tagged with {{unreferenced}}, only three were completely unsourced. The others seemed to have sufficient sourcing to at least verify basic biographical details. A couple were probably better referenced than your average article, e.g. [[Adrian Fenty]].

It seems that, regardless of intentions, people add {{unreferenced}} to articles that are at least partially referenced, seemingly as an alternative to {{fact}} if they see anything they question.

Thus, I don't think that the presence of {{unreferenced}} on an article means too much; judging by this, I don't think that this is a much lower standard of referencing than of ten articles chosen at random.

I think the articles we really have to worry about are those that nobody's noticed even to add a cleanup tag to.

-Matt

Matthew Brown wrote:

On 4/21/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:

...

I guess the list shows that {{unreferenced}} is overused. Most of the articles on the list are not in the least problematic.

I sampled ten articles - 3331 through 3340, just because they happened to be at the top of a column.

Here's my ten, 4390-4399 (chosen by spinning the scroll wheel on my mouse and then picking the first round number that caught my eye)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branko_Bokun

A short article with one inline reference and two external links. They're not very good sources but the inline reference appears to back up many of the basic biographical details. Could use more but for an article this size what we've got seems enough to remove the {{unreferenced}} tag.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Genovese

A medium-sized article with a lot of unsourced information about legal problems he's had, and one inline reference down at the bottom about an unrelated matter. Definitely needs improving. A quick Googling found a whole bunch of news stories, though, that backed up many of the basics. I added some links but didn't take the time to go through some of the later details so left the tag in place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammy_Plante

A short article about a Playboy model. There's an external link to an interview that's pretty fluffy but that appears to back up some of the basics about her. With just that one link it'd be pretty sparse, but Google's first hit on her name was her homepage with extensive biographical information so I tossed that in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikezawa_Natsuki

A Japanese poet and translator. A fairly lengthy article that appears to have been translated from the Japanese Wikipedia, there are only two external links. One is to a bit of biographical information but the other appears to be just an essay he's written. Needs more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chico_Slimani

A singer. Lengthy article with no inline refs, but external links contains links to his homepage with a biography that backs up some of it. I added a few inline refs but not enough to take the tag off yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Godwin

Voice actor with a two-line stub and a list of works he's been in. External links includes an IMDB and a profile on another page. The other profile is currently offline but I found it easily enough in archive.org. Taking the tag off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu%7Eki

Stub article about a musician along with a short list of random trivia. There's one external link to a fansite with an extensive bio and a profile that seems to back up much of what's here. I'm leaving the tag on simply because the bio at the web site is long and poorly organized so I can't spend the time to pick out the details, but I suspect it's all there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adem_Atay

Stub about a soccer player. One external link to a profile giving only the most basic biographical information, but there isn't much more than that here so I'm taking the tag off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_Unser

Stub about an Indy 500 race car driver. The article has no links or references. Google didn't provide any easy sources in the first page of results but a quick glance does confirm that he's a race car driver who was active around the time the article claims.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hodges

Mid-sized article about a football player. The {{unreferenced}} tag in this case was completely misapplied; the article had nine inline references already that were scattered throughout the text. Removing tag.

So, of the ten I sampled most already had external links that backed up a bunch of the material in the article, some to such a degree that I felt the tag was inappropriate. None of these middling-quality articles had controversial-looking contents.

One had a lot of potentially controversial unreferenced stuff about legal problems, but references could be quickly found using Google.

One had no references whatsoever and wasn't quickly fixable with Google but was noncontroversial.

One was highly referenced, I have no idea why the unreferenced tag was put on it.

So my impression from this sample is that most of the articles tagged as unreferenced are actually just _poorly_ referenced, with only a handful being dangerously unreferenced and a roughly equal handful being in actually well-referenced articles that have been mislabelled as unreferenced. So rather than almost 7000 problem articles I suspect we've got closer to 700. Out of 1.5 million this strikes me as a pretty good score.