[WikiEN-l] Saying no to new unreferenced BLPs

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 2:21 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

p.s. I put this on the Village Pump for discussion as well --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#changing_text_of_edit_summary_field

-- phoebe