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

[Ray Saintonge]

Stan Shebs wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>  
>
>>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.
>>>      
>>>
>>This is one of those half-empty or half-full kinds of arguments.  
>>Without Susan's edit her idea might never have been raised.  What she 
>>sees as half-full you see as half-empty.  You evidently enjoyed your 
>>half-hour of research, or you would not have done it.  The point that 
>>she made was worth that much of your time.  At least you researched it.  
>>The one who simply dismisses her comments out of hand and without 
>>comment is really committing the same error that she did.
>>    
>>
>That's not a very good line of reasoning - vandalism sprees must also be 
>good things, because we spend a lot of time cleaning up after them, so 
>we must be enjoying doing so? I don't think so. 
>
Vandalism sprees, which are need to spread the same kind of stupidity 
across a number of articles to be efficient, are quite different in 
character from a newbie's efforts.  A simple review of Susan's edit 
history should reveal that.

>No, when I clean up 
>after someone who didn't take the trouble to find out if a statement is 
>actually true, that person has just wasted my time. 
>
You have the choice between cleaning up, advising someone else, or doing 
nothing.

>I used to watch a 
>lot of articles (19,000 at the high point), and it was multiple hours of 
>drudgery each day; eventually I cleared the list. 
>
It seems that by doing so you made a great contribution to your own 
personal well-being. :-)

>Casual editors adding 
>bad material from memory is actually a worse problem for good articles 
>than vandalism, because it's good-faith and often looks plausible; it 
>can get by you and mislead readers for months, and worse, start seeping 
>into connected articles as others "correct" them to be consistent. 
>
That risk is definitely there.  By the same token the editor who takes 
unsourced material from one Wikipedia article, and injects it into 
another article as "corrections" is just as guilty of adding unsourced 
material as the original editor.

Ec