Anthony DiPierro wrote:
But the reason I'm writing is to respond to your
second point. Yes, it's
much easier for most people to write a stub than to write a comprehensive,
well referenced article. And yes, some of this won't ever go away. But I
think this also points to a weak point in the Mediawiki software. Adding
references is a major pain in the ass, and once those references are added
it's usually not at all clear what parts of the article are referenced and
what parts aren't, so the same work gets done over and over again. Finally,
even though there are in theory rules that people should be adding
references whenever they add substantial text to the wiki, these rules are
not at all enforced.
Maybe a really simple addition to the wiki could be made to help this - an
optional field in addition to the comments field to list source(s) for your
edit. Just a free text field, which you could leave blank if you really want
to, which would be accessible to people who want to fact-check a
contribution. Eventually we might be able to figure out how to get the
software to tie the reference to the contributed text, but just adding the
field would be a good start and less than a day's worth of coding.
The irony is that rules about references are ignored, while dubious
rules about notability are regularly applied by a certain segment.
Something that lacks verifiability tends to say more about the
credibility of the project than something which is verifiable but merely
trivial.
Linking references to spscific parts of an article is important, but I
would be less concerned about that than about articles that have no
references at all. Adding references is indeed a pain in the ass, and
even more so when you did not write the article. Someone who encounters
an article with no references at all may have no idea where to look for
information about it. The original contributor presumably had references
right there when he wrote the article If he didn't, and wrote from
memory, we have no way of knowing whether he is perpetuating some sort
of urban myth. Your idea is constructive, and it makes the physical
process of adding references a little easier, but I don't see the
problem of references as primarily at that level of the process. The
writers just need to do their own basic research.
Ec