On 4/21/07, Michael Snow wikipedia@att.net wrote:
That may be true, in the sense that not every unreferenced article raises major ethical concerns. Though it's undeniable that we have seriously flawed articles, and if that includes so much as one out of a hundred of these, it's far too many. Maybe we should delete most of our overused templates and encourage people to actually work on articles instead of playing with tags.
Now that'd be the trick, wouldn't it? Although categorizing articles by quality metrics is certainly useful, my gut feeling after looking at a selection of these tagged articles is that the referencing isn't really much worse, if at all, than a random pick of untagged articles.
Part of this is that exactly what {{unreferenced}} means isn't really all that much. All it means is that some editor at some point decided that the article needed more references than it then had. It says nothing about what proportion of the article is not supported by its sources. It says nothing, in most cases, about what exactly the problem is. It says nothing about the kind of statements that are lacking references. And, frankly, it doesn't even mean that the article lacks for references at all - given that tags are often not removed even if the article is fixed, and that the tags generally reflect a single editor's opinion.
It seems as if in many cases the article is so-tagged simply because the reference material is found in a ==External links== rather than ==References== section.
-Matt