[WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs

[Erik Moeller]

2009/4/1 doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com>:
> Is it perhaps time, that we started to demand that basic sourcing was a
> pre-requisite of creating an article on any living person?

Without commenting on this specific proposal, I thought it interesting
that the de.wikipedia.org community implemented a fairly simple way to
drive more sourcing on all articles: They made the edit summary field
mandatory for new users, and have renamed it to "Summary and Sources",
making it clear in lots of places that edits without sources aren't
acceptable. If you look at anon recent-changes on de.wp, you'll notice
that this has led to lots of people including URLs, etc., directly in
their edit summaries. [1] This makes it at least a bit easier for
other users to decide on whether the edit was legitimate.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Letzte_%C3%84nderungen&hideliu=1
- As an interesting side note, the mandatory summary script doesn't
seem to trigger on section edits, and those are still very frequently
unexplained.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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