[Foundation-l] Enforcing WP:CITE

[Ray Saintonge]

Brian wrote:

> In light of the recent USA Today article: 

What article?  Would it not be better if you followed your own rules 
about citing something before you go around spreading panic.

> In the same way that we are currently enforcing proper image tags 
> using a bot, could we do the same with unsourced articles? Start out 
> by placing {{unsourced}} in all the articles lacking sources, and 
> then, if it is not sourced in a week, create something like the 
> {{copvio}} page-replacer to hide the unsourced content (the entire 
> article), explaining with a detailed message that the article must be 
> thoroughly sourced. 

This is absolutely unrealistic.  The image tagging project has been 
going on for perhaps a year (?), and it's gradually getting to where we 
want it.  No reliable editor opposes the idea of having pages properly 
referenced, and ever since having referenced pages became the norm there 
has been great progress in that area. Now because of one alleged 
newspaper article you expect several hundred thousand articles to be 
repaired in a week.  If not you will on your own initiative have a bot 
go through and delete any material that YOU find inappropriate. 

Perhaps you should start by showing a little trust in your fellow 
editors rather than begin with a series of hostile enforcement actions. 

> In my mind, at least, it doesn't seem like there should be any 
> difference between enforcing sources for images and sources for 
> articles. If anything we should be enforcing the latter more, since 
> articles form the basis of the encyclopedia. I know this won't solve 
> everything, but I think it should be a vital part of Wikipedia; since 
> we do not know who edits an article, we need to know that it is based 
> on information that we can verify ourselves. 

Although I agree that the text in articles is more important than the 
images, which are mostly only there to make things look pretty, I also 
think that two years might be a more realistic time frame for cleaning 
this up.

Ec