[WikiEN-l] let's be honest then

Anthony wikilegal at inbox.org
Sun Apr 1 00:23:29 UTC 2007


On 3/31/07, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/31/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 1) The idea of an error-free encyclopedia is a pipe dream. No
> > sourcing requirements, no matter how onerous, will render us error-
> > free. Pursuit of an impossible goal at the expense of achievable ones
> > is foolish.
>
> This is a false dialectic.  It's not a binary choice; please stop
> presenting it as one.  Nobody expects an error-free encyclopedia, but
> a lot of us would like one with fewer errors than the one we have now.
>
Almost all of us would.  Now, how can that be done?  Preferably a way
which doesn't involve randomly or automatically (via bot) deleting
articles.

Find some errors, and get rid of them, would be the most direct
approach.  Find potential errors (i.e. unsourced statements), and get
rid of them, would be a bit more drastic one.  But both of these are
already policy.  So what's the next step?

Maybe an open mailing list for non-confidential complaints, to
complement the closed OTRS for confidential complaints?  Mailing lists
are probably kind of inefficient for this, though.

Code would be great, of course, but as I'm not currently able to
contribute any myself I'll leave that part out.  Abolishing AfD would
probably free up a lot of people's time.

Does anyone have a list of figures of the magnitude of the problem?
Number of biographies, number of unsourced biographies, results of a
study of how many errors there are on average, blah blah blah?

Anthony



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