[WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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.

This is pretty great, and could be an easy, painless way to up
sourcing across the board. Certainly, footnote syntax is so confusing
that many people just don't bother; and this would probably help with
identifying copyvios as well.

A while (years?) ago the idea came up of using some sort of semantic
form for new articles that included, explicitly, a box for sources;
and I think that is a great idea as well. In the meantime, what about
a link at the top of the create an article box to the code for a basic
article that could be pasted in, including a refs section? Or a link
to a step by step article creation tutorial, like on Articles for
creation?

I am all in favor of seeing if we can change people's behavior in
subtle ways; it will take many solutions all working together to fix
blp's.

-- phoebe