On 5/10/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
And there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is that GA lost sight
of
its original purpose very early on, and became a mini-FA. I've had
decent
articles on subjects where not much can be written because of lacking sources rejected from GA - even in its first few months - and so I've
given
up completely on getting such articles recognised as being "good
quality,
but can't really go anywhere because they don't have sources or for some other reason can't make FA". In the end, these articles cannot be distinguished from the rest of the tripe that is normally on Wikipedia,
and
as such complicates things when, say, we want to compile articles illustrating the breadth of our coverage, since this practice
effectively
accentuates systemic bias.
If there really aren't any reliable sources available, then the article shouldn't be on Wikipedia, since it is OR. Such articles are not what GA was invented for.
No, I mean articles like, say, [[Karamjit Singh]]. There aren't many (if any) sources about his personal life - where he was born, where he went to school, normal biographical stuff. So does this mean he should be excluded from consideration for things like GA because he can't fulfill the normal requirements of a biographical article?
I'm not talking about articles which don't have any sources at all. I'm talking about articles which can source all the existing statements fine, but can't be expanded because of lacunae in reliable sources. Should these articles thus be disqualified from being marked as above the quality of a typical article, when most of our articles don't even have sources for all their statements, and we've become known for things like that illustrated in the webcomic below?
http://www.wondermark.com/d/291.html
Johnleemk