[WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:07 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_is_a_mess_wikipedians_say_1_in_20_articl.php
>
> Now, we have a lot of work to do, it's obviously encyclopedic and it
> would be hard to get really wrong.
>
> What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for
> the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax
> problem. Make the results easily checkable by the experienced. Ban the
> use of Twinkle or similar semi-botlike mechanisms on the resulting
> edits, as nothing repels good-faith new users like instant reversion.
> What else?)

Responding more to the opinion piece published in the Signpost, than
what you are saying, my experience of looking through such backlogs is
large amounts of mis-labelling, or outdated labelling. Is it very
discouraging to think you are working on a backlog to find that the
article either never had the alleged problem, or that it was fixed but
no-one bothered to remove the tag identifying the problem. So I think
those numbers quoted in that opinion piece are worthless (i.e.
over-inflated through poor tagging practices). Random sampling,
tailored to specific areas, would give a better idea of the extent of
any problems, IMO.

What I think often happens is that someone tagging stuff thinks:
"there is a problem with this article, but rather than use the right
tag, or look at the problem in any detail, I'll put a tag on to be
safe and then move on". And then someone else, later, might fix the
article during general editing without even looking at the tag, and
not remove the tag, or might expect others to remove the tag (no,
really, that is a common attitude among some people who prefer others
to judge any remedial work they have done - you put the tag there, you
should come back and assess whether it is still needed).

And this in general put me off tags. I've hardly ever tagged articles
(preferring to fix them myself or point them out to someone who can
fix them), and I tend to ignore tags on articles, preferring to form
my own judgement over whether an article is reliable or not (i.e. why
should I trust the judgement of a random Wikipedian over whether the
article has problems, when all articles should be read with jaundiced
eye towards potential problems?).

Carcharoth