[WikiEN-l] Handling unreferenced but likely-valid material

[Jeff Raymond]

dmehkeri at swi.com wrote:

> No really, I think people doing their own small samples of Special:Random
> is a
> great idea. Truly random sampling is more "scientific" than you might
> realize. I
> am not a statistician, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but if
> all
> you're trying to do is rule out the <20% and/or the >80% claim, then 25
> clicks
> on Special:Random ought to be more than enough, 19 times out of 20.

In the spirit of this, I did my own Special:Random sample of 30.  I found:

Unsourced: 13
1 Working External link/reference: 6
Printed only: 2
Multiple References: 8

Of the 13 unsourced articles, 3 were lists (and I didn't check the
articles they were linking to for sources) 9 stubs, and only one was a
full-blown article lacking sourcing.  I may be in a minority on this one,
but I find unsourced stubs much less problematic than unsourced
''articles'', so my personal findings gave me a lot more hope than I
thought.

-Jeff

-- 
If you can read this, I'm not at home.