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