[WikiEN-l] 17,268 badly referenced living biographies

[John Lee]

On 5/8/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Matthew Brown wrote:
> > Worse, I often find {{fact}} applied to statements that are plainly in
> > the listed sources.
> >
>
> Yeah, I've been finding a lot of this in my attempts to wade through
> some of that category. Sometimes a {{fact}} tag will be applied to a
> statement that not only appears in the sources, but even has an inline
> footnote right near the location of the tag! It looks like a lot of
> {{fact}}-tagging is being done in a drive-by fashion by people who
> haven't read the article in question, so I've just been removing these.


I know! This is really one of the most irritating things for me - I hate a
surfeit of unnecessary footnotes, so I try to collate them as much as
possible in one footnote, but the result is people keep tagging cited
material with {{fact}}! We really need a way to mark which statements are
covered by which footnote.

A good proportion of the rest (probably 50% of my sample) are in
> articles that are completely unreferenced, but strangely have random
> sentences (usually not even particularly contentious ones) *also* tagged
> with {{fact}} in addition to an {{unreferenced}} at the top. This is
> clutter really; such articles should use a single {{unreferenced}} at
> the top and no {{fact}} tags, since using the latter makes it harder to
> use these categories. Specific sentences that for some reason are even
> more problematic than {{unreferenced}} generally implies for all
> sentences should probably be either tagged {{dubious}} or removed
> entirely, rather than tagged {{fact}}.


Alternatively, I think there's something like {{more sources}}, which can be
used instead of {{unreferenced}} for such articles.

-Mark


Johnleemk