One of the things that I've noticed is that articles (esp. in technical subjects) are occasionally listed as unsourced when the sources are textbooks (listed at the end of the article) that spend one or more chapters on the subject, the information from which is distributed throughout the article. Is there a policy somewhere that addresses this situation?
Carl
On 9/12/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Hello,
The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent Changes:
Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in the world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing the focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles that we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over 230,000 without any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these articles an hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all … and this does not include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc. These articles are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
- The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to
"Requested feature articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article, the focus should be on improving existing articles.
- Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that
end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who most improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel of judges will be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about what constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For historical reasons, this will be known as "Danny's third contest."
I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated in the previous two.
Danny _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l