I carry out mass actions on a regular basis on Wikipedia, I consider it part of Being Bold and the urgent reason for doing so is always to improve the encylopedia.
The question is whether or not we're better off with unreliable sources or with no sources at all. If the answer is no sources at all, I have no problems pulling 1000 inappropriate references if I can find them, just as I would remove spam external links from every article I found them in, or revert every single instance where someone replaced an article with "I love boobs!".
As you mentioned killing the patient in an attempt to cure them, do you think we're better off with somedudeswebpage.tripod.com as a reference for text in an article, and if so, why?
--- White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
Any mass action is disruptive unless there are urgent reasons to do so.
I would suggest finding a reliable source and updating the pages accordingly. No one would yell you for that and you would be more satisfied in what you are doing. It is always tempting to kill the patient to cure them but remember we want to avoid the patients death.
- White Cat
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:49 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 22/03/2008, bobolozo bobolozo@yahoo.com
wrote:
My question is, is it a good idea to simply go
through
and remove large numbers of these? Are we
better off
with no sources at all for portions of text,
rather
than have references which consist of message
board
postings and personal websites and such?
[...]
reference). But now, having discovered the
ease with
which I can find thousands more unreliable
sources as
references, I'm wondering what others think of
the
mass removal of unreliable sources. Am I correct in believing that we're better off
having
an unsourced paragraph of text, rather than a paragraph which has as a reference somedudeswebpage.tripod.com?
Take extreme caution and make damn sure you know
the subject area
first. "Reliable sources" is entirely relative to
the subject area.
Mass removal of references is the sort of thing
that has gotten people
taken out and shot by the arbitration committee
before.
- d.
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