For 10 years or more, already, reliable sources have been mandatory in
the Wikipedia in Portuguese, and any unsourced edit can and should be
reverted and the user warned.
Adding to that, since at least 2016, we use the abuse filters to block any
edition lacking sources. Newbies like the one described by Romaine would
receive a daunting red warning from the abuse filter system about the
necessity of adding reliable sources in order for their edit to be saved -
and the opportunity to go back and fix the problem. This has greatly
improved things there, in that subject.
Back in 2009, about 1 month after joining Wikipedia I found myself in a
serious conflict with other, well established users, about a well sourced
edit I wanted to add, which was being reverted by the veteran users in
favour of unsourced (and false) information. At the time, I had to comply
and swallow it, as the newbie I was. One year later, now with a reputation,
I returned to the theme, reverted the whole thing and opened a public case
there about falsification of information by said veteran user(s) - and that
time it stood. This whole episode deeply marked me, and made absolutely
clear that in Wikipedia there can be no tolerance for whatever lacks proper
sources - something we actually often indulge in in paper encyclopedias, in
my own experience. I'm very glad that the era of rampant tolerance with
people adding unsourced content - something that was already against all
good practices back in 2001 - is now a distant, sad memory. The quality of
our Wikipedia skyrocketed since then, changing the paradigm from "Wikipedia
is not reliable" to "Wikipedia is actually quite reliable, so much that I
actually want to be there" all over the Lusophone world - and bringing new
problems of its own. But that's undoubtedly the way to go, and it's sad it
took so much time to actually implement what should have been there already
from day 1.
Best,
Paulo
Romaine Wiki <romaine.wiki(a)gmail.com> escreveu (quarta, 6/03/2024 à(s)
13:59):
In the past days, a new Wikipedia contributor edited
Wikipedia and made a
great contribution, except... This user added zero sources, and the article
in what the edit was made was about a living person. So the verifiability
is a problem and in conflict with the policy Biographies of living persons.
This was just one example of thousands that have to be dealt with every day
in Wikimedia. And every day the community tries to maintain the quality of
Wikipedia and has to deal with this kind of edits.
I asked myself the question: why did this new contributor not add any
sources?
I logged out, went to an article and clicked edit. Made some modifications
(in the Visual Editor), and then clicked Publish changes. In the steps I
took to edit the article, I got nowhere a message that Wikipedia wants to
have sources for the information I added. Nowhere!
I hope that every experienced user by now understands the importance of
adding sources. But we cannot expect from new contributors to already know
this. They need to be informed that adding sources is needed. They do not
go first read the manual of Wikipedia with all the help and project pages,
they just start editing right away. They think, link in many other
platforms, that if they do something wrong, they get a message while
editing/uploading/etc.
For some strange reason, if you edit Wikipedia, you get no notification at
all that you need to add sources, even while this is one of the most
important pillars of Wikipedia. The result is that a lot of work of these
new contributors gets lost, because the information is removed from the
articles because of a lack of sources. If those new users would have got a
message in the Visual Editor during the editing, a lot more contributions
would be able to stay in Wikipedia, less new contributors would get
demotivated, and it would reduce the workload of existing users who do the
maintenance every day.
As with the influx of edits without sources nothing is done, the Dutch
expression "mopping with the tap open" (Dutch: dweilen met de kraan open)
applies here.
Romaine
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines
at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org…
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave(a)lists.wikimedia.org