[WikiEN-l] Elimination of unreferenced articles drive?

[K P]

On 6/19/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is what people may actually do, and it of course makes a farce of
> the whole thing. At that level of referencing, I could probably do
> about 50 an hour, on any subject about which  books have been written,
>
> With one approach, I do not need a library or even Google: Looking at
> Category:Articles_lacking_sources for July 06, I find Alpinist Unit.
> Its a unit of the IDF, I go tho the Israeli Defense Forces article, a
> general book is listed, I copy the reference. Should take about 30
> seconds. I then go to the category for IDF, and add the same reference
> to each of them.
>
> At the next level up, using another approach, I take a recent
> biochemistry textbook, and I go through it systematically, adding a
> ref for every term I encounter that has a WP article. (I could even
> put in page numbers),
> (most in that subject will have a ref, however, but I could do the
> same with a History of English Literature.)
>
> I could do it even more efficiently:   I search for "unreferenced
> biology", take a suitable advanced encyclopedia, and ...
>
> With a good semi automatic bot, using online sources only, I could
> probably do it two times as fast. It could even be completely
> automated after selected the book.
>
> But who does this help? Anyone reading the article can do this just as
> well when reading it. If I am to put in the best readily available
> good references for each article at an appropriate level of
> specificity, that's another matter.
>
> On 6/19/07, Chris Lüer <chris at zandria.net> wrote:
> > At 02:58 PM 6/19/2007, Eugene van der Pijll wrote:
> >
> > >Eliminating unreferenced articles does not mean finding sources for
> > >every fact. It just needs one for each article.
> > >
> > >And if you really cannot find a single reference, just merge the content
> > >into a related article and redirect the original. No loss of
> > >information, and it's now in a referenced article, so it will not be
> > >deleted.
> >
> > Until someone starts the Elimination of Unreferenced Sentences Drive... ;)
> >
> >          Chris
> >
> >
>
> --
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>
I could simply add my botany book as a reference to almost any general
article on botany, and many higher taxa organism articles, but it
doesn't make it a reference to that article.

I don't think adding references to articles that aren't really
references to that article is an improvement over unreferenced
articles.  This is an area where editors can be rather set: they think
the reference says what they see, but it doesn't, yet they want to
keep the reference in the article.

I had one editor cite 3 sources that didn't say what he claimed, and
he was not letting any of them or his statement go.

Let's not encourage this!

KP