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

[Stan Shebs]

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> 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.
>   
In the areas I'm familiar with, that's not really how the numbers work. 
There are lots of articles that I pass across, say "hmm, whole section 
is probably bogus", but I don't have the time or energy to do anything 
about it. In fact, it gets so tiresome I rarely even bother to note down 
the need for factchecking anymore. My time isn't so worthless that I'm 
willing to spend all of it perpetually cleaning up after the drivebys.

Stan