[WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Charles Matthews]

On 3 November 2011 11:10, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

> 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 large amounts of mis-labelling, or outdated labelling.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.
>
> My reaction was somewhat different. I went into the list of categories or
{{unreferenced}} tagging (by month) just to have a look. Well, it's pretty
miscellaneous. I did a few, including some of my own articles
(embarrassing, but except for one there was nothing that was really out of
hand).

The normal reaction is to slice and dice. Doing it by oldest goes back five
years, which is certainly not excellent; but the old ones didn't seem more
worrying than others, really. How many  are also tagged as orphans? This
seems more likely to be where really mucky stuff might lurk. Articles of
the type [[1853 in Canada]] are basically lists, and unreferenced lists are
really another issue. Priorities seem clearer when you get involved. Small
town in Slovakia: easy to check it exists.

The thing is that with a better classified backlog you'd get some easier
progress. If you Google the topic of these older articles, you tend to get
mirror material back, so I don't know that it is fair to ask newbies to sue
their own unsupported initiative.

Charles