I find it hard to believe that you read anything that I actually said. You've completely misrepresented my points in two substantial ways. 1) You talk about "non-referenced facts", while I am talking about non-referenced articles. Not just facts that don't have sources, entire articles without a single reference to anything outside the encyclopedia. 2) You talk about how it's impossible for us to fix "every unreferenced article" within 24 hours. But I am not talking about *old* unreferenced articles, I'm talking about *new ones*. Fixing all the unreferenced articles we currently have will be hard, and it will take a long time. But we'll never get finished if we keep creating new ones.
This isn't a quick fix. It's the first step in a long process.
Anthony
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
The crux of the problem is in what the endgame should be for an unreferenced article. Is it deletion or improvement? I would easily support improvement. If an article is unreferenced that does not imply that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
There's no question over the endgame. The question is over what to do in the meantime. If we don't know whether or not something is right, it shouldn't be in an article. Doesn't mean it can't be in user space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted articles history. That's my interpretation of [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.
We can begin with some kind of "unreferenced" tag, maybe even a flashing red "CAUTION" sign. :-) Beyond that, we need to remember that most of our non-referenced facts aren't controversial at all. Look at how long it has taken to put category tags on all articles. That's a much simpler task than referencing. Of your four suggestions only putting material on the article's talk page will even give a sporting chance for review. If you outright delete an unreferenced article there will not even be a link to Xxxx's talk page so that the material can be reviewed and documented. Have fun finding it!
Assuming good faith needs to be extended to the articles themselves. It recognizes that a contributor who was himself deceived by the information was probably acting in good faith. Fact checking an article is a tedious process that needs to apply to every statement in an article. It may be easy enogu to have a bot tag every unreferenced article with a notice that if it is not referenced in 24 hours it will be deleted. If ALL of us were to devote ourselves to that task for that 24 hours without sleeping there would still not be enough of us for the job. So when your second bot comes along and clears out the still referenced articles what would we have left? We need common sense, not impatience.
Actions based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes and needless stress. In planning new strategies this should be considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress. Without that this will be no different from AfD.
Ec
The endgame in either case is a well referenced article. The question is how do we get there.
Of course, but we can't depend on any kind of quick fix.
Ec