Anthony DiPierro wrote:

Right. It's not perfect. Just better. At least if someone is lazy and doesn't attribute something and then someone else catches them, it can be fixed. If we added a "references" field to the edit page, even if it was optional, the number of attributions would probably increase even more. The field would be unformatted, so someone could of course type "I just knew it" or "copied from some website" or even "poop" for their reference, but it'd be one more thing to look into if someone put their reference as "Wikipedia".

I put forward an idea a while ago which people weren't too keen on, but I think it's time for it to be presented again: when a new article is created, prefill it with text. e.g.

A '''pagetitle''' is ... (say what the article is about, with a bit of introductory detail)

==More detail==

(If there's more to say about it, put in sections with == == on the name of each section)

==See also==

==References== * (List the sources you used in writing this article) * *

==External links== * (List the few most relevant external web pages on the subject (home pages, etc) that you know of)

While this would just be wikitext, and any experienced Wikipedia regular could of course format an article how they liked, new editors would be presented clearly with what we expect from a new article.

With this in place, I think we could even allow anons to create articles again on en:. They certainly wouldn't just put "so what do you want me to type?"

I'm not sure if Mediawiki has new article prefill as yet, but it can't be that hard. The prefill wikitext could even be a Mediawiki: space message.

(Example of a new article I created today: [[XCB]]. I have something like the above template in my head when I write an article.)

Now, adding a references section would preferably add a column to a database table. Whether or not that would require scheduled downtime, I don't know.

Sounds like much more work than the above. The above would set out that we do expect references and so on. Ultimately, I think guiding new editors in how to do the right thing would work better than trying to force a given article format in the database.

- d.

[cc: to wikitech-l]