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

[Phil Sandifer]

On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:

> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>> 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.
> But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
> time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
> is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
> enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a  
> bunch
> of random half-remembered bits.

Simple. You're a different kind of editor than Susan. You're willing  
to put long hours into Wikipedia. You care enough to join a mailing  
list about Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's not the end of the world for  
you to spend half an hour on a task like this. Because (and this is  
important) most of the time it won't be wrong. Susan may not be 100%  
reliable, but she's pretty good. How do we know this? Because she  
wrote most of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is pretty good.

The model is this: we have thousands of Susans. They do a lot of the  
heavy lifting on Wikipedia. Then we have a few hundred hardcore users  
who fix the problems left by the thousands of Susans - they check odd  
facts that don't seem to jibe, they deal with malicious users, they  
get involved with edit wars, they delete, they debate policy.

Susan does 90% of the work. The hardcore do about 10% of the work, a  
lot of which is cleaning up after Susan. But that's still a massive  
net amount of work being done by Susan. Who does not show up on this  
mailing list to offer her viewpoint, which is why we need to take  
care to stop and think about Susan (and, of course, the other  
thousands of casual editors.)

-Phil