[WikiEN-l] Re: {{unreferenced}} tag?

[Michael Snow]

David Gerard wrote:

>Michael Snow (wikipedia at earthlink.net) [050129 03:13]:
>  
>
>>There are some people who don't seem terribly inclined to do the real 
>>research necessary to actually contribute to the encyclopedia, so they 
>>just go around slapping tags on whatever articles they run across. I 
>>would much rather they spent their time adding appropriate categories 
>>instead, which is something else that can be done with relatively little 
>>prior knowledge about a subject. The category system still needs serious 
>>organization and improvement, and would bring more real benefit to the 
>>encyclopedia than happy-go-lucky tag-slapping.
>>    
>>
>As I understood the (babelfished) de: quality page, what they did was a
>pile of tag-slapping, then going forth and trying to fix it. The first
>tells where to start on the second.
>  
>
That's not my impression, though someone more active in the process 
would be needed to say for sure. From my glances at the 
Qualitätsoffensive pages and some of the stuff that got worked on, it 
looks more like a cross between Collaboration of the Week and the 
Countering systemic bias project. They seem to collect ideas of what to 
work on, then go from there. I didn't see much in the way of tags, and 
in fact I saw more instances where categories were being used for this 
sort of thing than templates. So my impression was that the German 
Wikipedia has developed its practices somewhat differently from English 
in that regard.

It's not necessarily right or wrong either way, of course. But what bugs 
me particularly is that this sort of meta-information should be 
temporary in nature, but in practice it's often a one-way street. If 
there was actually a second wave of work that followed the first wave of 
tag-slappers, things would be much better.

>I can't see {{unreferenced}} becoming a bargaining chip in an edit war.
>(People who remove references are an entirely different problem.)
>  
>
I probably should have made more clear that I'm ranting generally about 
this use of tags, not specifically about the idea of using them to 
promote better use of references. In fact, the drive for better 
practices in source citation is something I very much support, and this 
sort of thing is fine if it helps. So far, at any rate, I've seen a lot 
more results from the people urging more and better references than I 
have from undifferentiated efforts like {{cleanup}}.

--Michael Snow