[WikiEN-l] The Counter Vandalism Unit? Whaa?

[Steve Bennett]

> The best way to deal with this in my opinion is to always 
> have the reference for the statistics handy. That way you can 
> always revert and say, "Sorry, that's not what the reference 
> says. Provide a new one if you want, but the numbers have to 
> match up." Personally, I'm less concerned that the figures 
> are "right" and more concerned that they match our cited 
> reference for them, because if they are wrong in the latter 
> case it isn't our fault.

For what it's worth, I do lots of things on Wikipedia, but fact checking
is very rarely one of them. Whether the population of City Fooboo is
3,458,345 or 3,458,365 isn't my thing. Yet I agree that the figure
really ought to match a cited source. Given that I don't care to go and
find out the real figure (every time I've attempted to do something
similar I end up with three different figures), I find myself in a bit
of a quandary. Especially when there actually isn't a cited source...

{citeneeded} is a start, but I'd really like to somehow flag the user's
edit for subsequent checking. In the same way that people look for the
presence of logged-in users' edits as a sign that the article has
undergone very basic checking, I would like to explicitly disclaim such
a suggestion.

In short: I would *really* like more advanced meta data on diffs. Both
to be able to provide more information on edits as I make them, with
flags etc, and to be able to comment on *other* people's edits. Even a
simple "disputed" flag would be better than nothing. But even better,
have two flags: "disputed" and "fact check required", and allow any user
to set them. But only allow admins or the user who set them to unset
them.

Steve