Walter van Kalken wrote: Creating a "References" section or using a template to make a proper book citation will be just as detectable as using an external link. We are currently only talking about citing sources, not about verifying them. Articles need to be referenced before their contents can be verified. This isn't panicking. This is doing what we should have been doing all along, and treating our article content with the same importance that we treat our image content. This is a step in the right direction.

The Soi case. On the Dutch wikipedia I wrote the article [[soi]]. It was also written on the english wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soi) According to the CITE principal this article should be deleted right now as it is not from a book nor a website, but partly from my own and any Thais experience. Even though it contains pure facts which are the truth it doesn't cite anything as no sources are used. Note I didn't write the english article but it basicaly says the same as the Dutch article. Facts: /*1) Soi*/ (Thai <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet>: *???*) is the term used in Thailand <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thailand> for a side-street branching off a major street (/thanon <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thanon&action=edit>/). An alley is called a /Trok <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trok&action=edit>/. All true but do not have it from any book. 2) Sois are usually numbered, and are referred to by the name of the major street and the number, as in "Sukhumvit Soi 4", Also please come and have a look but not from any book 3) All the even-numbered sois are on one side of the street, the odd-numbered ones on the other. How do you want me to prove that from citations without flying you over here? 4) If for instance a soi is added between soi 7 and soi 9 it will get the name soi 7/1, the next one soi 7/2 etc. Again fact new soi was added between 2 sois near my home got the 6/1 number as it was between sois 6 and 8. No sources sorry 5) Almost all sois also have a name. I first wanted to be bolder as I have never seen a soi that doesn't also have a name. But I decided to be a bit less sure about it 6) On lower Sukhumvit road in Bangkok for instance the soi's are named after important landowners or families of landowners who had land in the area in the past. Verified with Thais whose families actually come from these landowners and have been living in the area for a long time. Again no books. 7) Some sois become major thoroughfares and because of that get known by their name only. Examples are Thonglor (Sukhumvit soi 55), Asoke (Sukhumvit soi 21) etc. Again plain fact. Books anyone? So according to the CITE offensive this article and many like this should be deleted even though there is nothing that is not the truth in there. Is it original research? I do not think so. You see the problem is when you start this CITE offensive one day one of our "police" officers will find this article and put it up for deletion because there are no sources. People take these so called guidelines much to strict and cause damage with it. This is why I would say be stricter on anons and newbies and maybe make some kind of ranking of wikipedians that are known to work in good faith or that are known IRL. Like me, anyone can always call me (see my phonenumbers) I even put my homeaddress up once. I might not always be able to quote directly where I got something from. But I am handling in good faith. And with me there are many people like me. Waerth/Walter

SJ wrote: Hoi, I find it remarkable that this CITE thing may break one of our fundamental reasons for success. It will drive people away when it is used as a tool to justify deletions. Why will it drive people away, because it raises the entry level to a point where many people will just no longer bother to do something. Yes, there may be an EDIT button, but without a citation it will be gone. Having citations is a good thing but please realise that it is best used when controversies arise. It is then part of the instrumentarium to come to a NPOV. When it used on its own I expect it to prove disastrous for the influx of new people into our community. Certainly if this is deemed to be necessary to be followed by all the projects that do not have the maturity of the English language wikipedia. So, when you in the en.wikipedia decide to have this new deletion policy, consider the fallout it may have elsewhere. Thanks, GerardM

Yes SJ you will be able to handle it in a correct matter and so will many other wikipedians. But you must admit we have a group of users who will read this and take it as a golden rule and start upsetting people. There are lots of wikipedians who simply do not read something as a whole. They just read MUST CITE and that is what they'll remember and they go on causing havoc. And it will be worse in other languages. More than once I had to stop somebody who was citing english wikipedia rules which are not applicable to nl.wikipedia. Now you and me unfortunately do not have the time to watch the respective wikis we work on 24 hours a day. So before you start writing this down please thank about it. Waerth/Walter

Ray Saintonge wrote: My experience is that we have a group of users for whom using common sense unfortunately is beyond their grasp. You should know that by now. Many people want security in life and rules give security to them so they unfortunately fixate more on the rule part than common sense part :( Waerth/Walter

As Danny has repeatedly mentioned, normal published textbooks, including encyclopedias, have every single fact cited and checked before the publisher will go on with printing the book. These citations aren't made public, but they are done, nonetheless. Why should we be any different? This doesn't necessarily mean putting 1000 sources in the reference section. There are other options we can consider, or new ways of citing content online, that are different from the methods used in printed books. Jim wrote:

On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Walter van Kalken wrote: Precisely. An entire "references" page for each article, and an entire article for/about each reference. This will revolutionize collaborative research and analysis. SJ

Walter van Kalken wrote: The page on which one chooses to put the quotes is only an aesthetic function. The important thing is that they are findable and public. The purpose of citations is to give the reader the opportunity to verify the data for himself. He can't do that if the citations are not public. Ec

On 12/2/05, Brian &lt;brian0918(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: That would be more sourced than most published books or encyclos. We can also track and show (as mouseover text?) the contributed-date and contributing-user for every word/set of words in an article. There are a few nuances in getting the attribution right, but we can at least offer a first-approximation without much work. Figuring out how to effectively store and render that information, is another question... ++SJ

On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Walter van Kalken wrote: It's not a matter of 'chasing people away' - leave such a feature off by default; it wil reduce the processing problems. But tracking who added particular chunks of text is quite literally providing the latest reference (and the only reference we can automatically guarantee to be accurate within the site). "People like ourselvs" -- I love it. And what other kind of people are there? So you're going to remove the source because you disagree with it? Even though you have no other source? The Wikitravel page is another world-readable source discussing the same topic in English -- by people who may be just as 'qualified' to opine about Sois as you are. If you disagree with that source, you should at least note that people are talking about this subject on other sites. It helps demonstrate that the word exists; which is a start (since we don't have a wiktionary entry about it yet). SJ

Ec, thanks for that one ... I suppose you understood also what I mean - I am not against giving references (I add them when I have them here), but I am not willing (or better I really do not have the time) to re-research whatever I learnt ... and also: many things come out of stuff I translated - sometimes when I translate things they are not for the public in that moment (new machinery developments, sometimes press releases that are prepared beforehand etc. - this is impossible to be followed up and also to be cited as source - these, in the moment I work on it, must be kept secret and I would never give that information out before you can't read about it in other places) and that after years are just "normal" things people talk about every day. This is valid for many of us. Well, this is one of those things ... some poeple would give parts of their copyrighted and non GFDL material to a portal if they may decide any license for it. This means: somehwere on the web, we should have such a place. There are for example authors that allow for publication of their work, but they don't want it under GFDL - so what would be wrong with such a place? It would make sure that things are collected in "one library" and the when things become copyright free it can simply be transferred to the right projects. And: it would be much easier to connect things. Ciao, Sabine ___________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger: chiamate gratuite in tutto il mondo http://it.messenger.yahoo.com

Hoi, Re-iterating what has been said does not make for understanding. By being inflexible and apparently not understanding what concerns there are on the other end of an issue. You entrench your position. I will tell you why we are different. We are different because we are not a professionally produced publication. We do not have the pretence that we know it all. We invite everyone to contribute and these other publications do not. When you, and here I repeat myself, do not care for the people who have never cited anything and make them out to be wrong as a consequence, you do not understand why we are different. Again, citations have their place but do not quote your sources relating subjects like religion because they are all hopelessly point of view. The only thing you can achieve there is that you show that someone published a point of view. Citations and sources are a double edged sword, they either allow you to clear up disputes or they allow you to destroy what differentiates Wikipedia from these "normal published textbooks, including encyclopaedias". So "obviously" you must be right because you quotes your source.. Then again if this is the case, what did you add to the discussion ? And what makes your source the authority that makes the difference ? Thanks, GerardM Brian wrote:

Gerard Meijssen wrote: This is the back to basics argument. It's amazing how well it works in so many different circumstances. Success is a poison pill. It can be deadly if you use it without understanding the instructions. Ec

Walter van Kalken wrote: It depends on the article. Mostly those will be highly contentious articles where the content of the sentences was in fact questioned. See the talk page. (I have occasionally written defensively on matters of controversy between the participants, referencing each phrase.) Another nomination from ignorance, apparently. I'm not surprised there are now webcomics about the way deletion works on en: in practice. The user wasn't even explained on I floated this idea on AFD's talk page. Apparently the regulars consider it too much effort. - d.

Brian wrote: OK, a semi-automatic bot-assisted {{unreferenced}}-tagging. That'll find them. We can then run "find the sources" drives. Sound workable? - d.

Brian wrote: Templates aren't taken too seriously because there are too many of them. There is no motivation in your scheme. If your {{unsourced}} template is only going on the articles most people won't notice it, and won't notice anything is wrong until they have need to visit the article only to find the information is gone. Why shouldn't peer reviewed encyclopedias be put to the same standard. What makes our long standing contributors any less trusted? Many of us do not accept this kind of elitism. Ec

Fred Bauder wrote: It's not necessary to source *everything*. Paris is the capital of France, everyone knows that. We don't need to cite some obscure French governmental listing which proves this. What does need to be cited are facts which are not common knowledge (like statistics) and opinions which must be attributed. I've now started removing any additions to pages I have on my watchlist which I do not think are common knowledge and have no source for the claims, and I have asked contributors to cite where they are getting this information from. Chris

Fred Bauder wrote: Have you ever known me to be anything but a diplomat? ;) Chris

I think there is a good deal of un-necessary panic going around about this USA Today thing. Did it really tell us anything new? No. Misinformation in rarely visited articles has ALWAYS been a problem. It's also not nearly as amenable to any kind of automated process as image tagging. Let's not run around like headless chickens because some journalist found that conspiracy-theorist things had been put into his Wikipedia article. Fact is: Wikipedia's improving. At quite a tremendous rate, in fact. It's easy to forget (a) the magnitude of the task, and (b) how bad we were even a year ago. -Matt

Matt Brown wrote: Yes, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything about it. We know about it, now let's fix it. What is wrong with my suggestion? Just because it doesn't work as well as image tagging doesn't mean that we shouldn't bother trying it at all. That journalist writes for the most read paper in the US. He tells everyone that Wikipedia is useless. People read that and believe that Wikipedia is useless. This is a fact that we have to face, not ignore out of pride. We can easily get to a point in time when we will be overwhelmed by the number of editors and new content, and are wishing that we had taken some sort of measures early on, rather than sit back and boast about improvements.

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Matt Brown wrote: I beg to differ : this highlighted one or two new things. 1) Wikipedia is important enough to significantly injure the reputations of people/organizations that are known elsewhere on the web. It may provide 2 or more of the top 10 search results for content about them. An old problem, but getting worse with increased popularity. This is the most egregious case I have seen. 2) While misinformation in rarely-visited articles has always been a problem, yes, and seems almost characterizable -- at least, WP editors are able to pick out potentially troublesome articles at a glance. Truly offensive and dangerous misinformation should be easiest of all to characterize. Nevertheless, the biggest and most serious reusers of static copies of WP content do not currently differentiate between possibly-problematic and probably-unproblematic material. This magnifies the impact of the problem, and can confuse readers who are used to looking for more than one independent sources, as 'independence' gets harder to identify. 3) This article was linked to from other pages. It was noticed and wikified. At this stage, something could have been done about it. If the first page of our style guide included not only "how to bold the topic" and "how to link out", but also "how to flag emotional or controversial content" and "how to mark short, unsourced articles" -- this might have been noticed and fixed during the ensuing three months. Why not? Requiring a 'references' section for every article (thanking the heavens that WP is not paper), and reminding every editor that *every* new article should come with at least one reference, seems a responsible thing to do. Can you offer a reason not to have such a section for any article? If you're writing about one of those topics that is a) not private research/analysis of your own, but b) has never been written about anywhere else [that you know of], then we need a new class of references : "personal observation by [user]", with a relevant tag not unlike the original-reporting templates used on Wikinews. Then it will be crystal clear that readers should visit your page, and see whether they trust you as the primary/original observer/author. The responsibilities of being widely-read are growing at the same rate, if not faster. SJ

I am surprised that both you SJ and Mart are saying this. Obviously both off you didn't read my case about the soi article on english wikipedia. Which is an article like many which is almost impossibly referenced. Since the two of you never read it I'll post it again here. And according to the 2 of you this article which is perfectly well the truth should be deleted because it is either not referenced or "personal research" ? Waerth/Walter The Soi case. On the Dutch wikipedia I wrote the article [[soi]]. It was also written on the english wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soi) According to the CITE principal this article should be deleted right now as it is not from a book nor a website, but partly from my own and any Thais experience. Even though it contains pure facts which are the truth it doesn't cite anything as no sources are used. Note I didn't write the english article but it basicaly says the same as the Dutch article. Facts: /*1) Soi*/ (Thai <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet>: *???*) is the term used in Thailand <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thailand> for a side-street branching off a major street (/thanon <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thanon&action=edit>/). An alley is called a /Trok <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trok&action=edit>/. All true but do not have it from any book. 2) Sois are usually numbered, and are referred to by the name of the major street and the number, as in "Sukhumvit Soi 4", Also please come and have a look but not from any book 3) All the even-numbered sois are on one side of the street, the odd-numbered ones on the other. How do you want me to prove that from citations without flying you over here? 4) If for instance a soi is added between soi 7 and soi 9 it will get the name soi 7/1, the next one soi 7/2 etc. Again fact new soi was added between 2 sois near my home got the 6/1 number as it was between sois 6 and 8. No sources sorry 5) Almost all sois also have a name. I first wanted to be bolder as I have never seen a soi that doesn't also have a name. But I decided to be a bit less sure about it 6) On lower Sukhumvit road in Bangkok for instance the soi's are named after important landowners or families of landowners who had land in the area in the past. Verified with Thais whose families actually come from these landowners and have been living in the area for a long time. Again no books. 7) Some sois become major thoroughfares and because of that get known by their name only. Examples are Thonglor (Sukhumvit soi 55), Asoke (Sukhumvit soi 21) etc. Again plain fact. Books anyone? So according to the CITE offensive this article and many like this should be deleted even though there is nothing that is not the truth in there. Is it original research? I do not think so. You see the problem is when you start this CITE offensive one day one of our "police" officers will find this article and put it up for deletion because there are no sources. People take these so called guidelines much to strict and cause damage with it. This is why I would say be stricter on anons and newbies and maybe make some kind of ranking of wikipedians that are known to work in good faith or that are known IRL. Like me, anyone can always call me (see my phonenumbers) I even put my homeaddress up once. I might not always be able to quote directly where I got something from. But I am handling in good faith. And with me there are many people like me.

Matt Brown wrote: On en:, even that will help a *great* deal. Either original research or that case. In that case, the personal observation should go on the talk page for others to find a good reference for. - d.