On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 2:39 PM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
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
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A very simple and non-controversial start might be to ask New Page patrolers, when they see a new unsourced BLP (or indeed any unsourced article) to put a polite message on the creator's talk page saying
"Thanks for your article [XYZ]. Wikipedia asks that all material be verifiable from reliable sources, it is important that readers and other users can check what's been writen. You don't seem to have told us the source you used for this article. Please can you edit the article to indicate what the source is? (Click here for help if you don't know how.) Unsourced material about living people may be removed if challenged."
That doesn't bite or threaten any newbies, although if established editors keep getting these on their talk pages, threats might be warranted.
Yes, definitely -- I try to do this whenever I dabble in new page patrolling, and it depresses me to no end that everyone doesn't do this. It's common politeness. The majority of new articles aren't suitable for wp, but they aren't spam or pure vandalism either -- and we need to do a much better job of interacting with these potential good contributors.
For a template, I think you're looking for something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcomeunsourced, only less wordy and not only for reverted edits.
p.s. per my previous msg, I guess I'm showing my age -- I think I was thinking of the new page template proposal from 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_article_template
-- phoebe