[WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

[Phil Sandifer]

On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:15 PM, Robth wrote:

>
> I disagree.  Citing is not as difficult as you seem to think it is; if
> you're in the middle of writing an article based on sources that are
> sitting in front of you, it really isn't that hard to note down where
> the facts came from as you write them down (lately I've become a fan
> of the <ref>Unless otherwise noted, all details regarding [Subtopic X]
> are drawn from [Source Y], pp. A-Z.</ref> style for citing basic facts
> with relative ease).  It's true that casual editors tend not to cite
> their contributions, but nobody does at first, and I think that the
> reason for this has less to do with unwillingness to do so than with
> the idea simply not occuring to people.

It's not unwillingness as such. In an earlier post I used the  
hypothetical example of Susan. I like this example, so I'll use it  
again here.

Susan is a 40-year-old stay at home mother who majored in English.  
While idly browsing, she has found an error in the article on [[Pride  
and Prejudice]] and wants to fix it. Her son gets off the school bus  
in five minutes.

Now my claim is that every policy and process on Wikipedia should be  
usable by Susan. That is to say that there should not be any rules  
that Susan cannot remember off the top of her head, there should not  
be any code or processes that Susan would have to look up, there  
should be no pages that Susan must check before she hits "Edit."  
Susan should be able to complete the task of fixing an error and  
still meet her son at the bus stop.

If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has  
to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing  
precious seconds of Susan's time. (And beyond that, as I said  
elsewhere, if we depend on the low-hanging fruit of sources, which is  
what we do if we demand sourcing of people who don't have the time to  
do it right, we get crap sourcing. Constant crap sourcing is lower  
quality than we get if we trust people's memories some of the time.)   
If she has to go dig up her undergrad English textbook, it's a lost  
cause.

This is the problem. We conceived of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:CITE]]  
without thinking of usability problems. And so we have policies that  
can't be used by anyone other than us, the Wikipedia hardcore. Which  
is a tiny minority of our userbase.

-Phil