[Foundation-l] Requiring a References section (was Re: Enforcing WP:CITE)

[SJ]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Matt Brown wrote:

> 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.

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.

> It's also not nearly as amenable to any kind of automated process as
> image tagging.

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.

> 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.

The responsibilities of being widely-read are growing at the same rate, if 
not faster.

SJ