[WikiEN-l] Nobel prizewinning chemist: "in my field, Wikipedia is more reliable than textbooks"

[Carcharoth]

Thanks for that. And for looking into the history of that. The fact
that the tag stayed there for so long doesn't surprise me at all. Most
casual editors, if they don't know how the system works, will assume
that someone else will deal with the tag and eventually remove it.
This is one reason backlogs got so big, because only a small
proportion of editors actually use the tags and their workflows in a
systematic manner, and this doesn't include the vast majority of
casual editors.

One other thing has struck me about the reliability of tagging, and
that is the fact that most of the articles I use to look up stuff most
days (from high-traffic articles to relatively obscure stuff) tends
not to have tags (though some do). I think this is an indication in
same way that stuff that people look at and care about gets edited and
improved enough that they don't get tagged (or the tags are removed),
but that stuff that is tagged but not fixed may tend to be the stuff
that readers and editors don't really care about enough (again, stats
of article traffic for the backlogs would help immensely here). The
few times I've dipped into the backlog, I've recoiled at the stuff
being written about and then tagged as they are mostly borderline
notable and I just can't bring myself to help out with stuff that
frankly arouses no interest in me and I'm never likely to need to
refer to as a reader.

The backlog I dipped into was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections

Selecting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections_from_October_2009

And the articles I looked at were:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Pace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Palackal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palamaneri

In all three cases, I struggled to convince myself that editing these
articles would be a good use of my time. I then got briefly excited
when I spotted this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulovsky_expedition

But then I realised that the expedition never took place (though to be
fair, it is more interesting than it looks, and I might go back to
that one). My point being that unless people are very disciplined,
they will work best on what interests them, and I suspect large parts
of the older bits of the backlogs are obscure articles of borderline
notability that no-one can summon up enough motivation to work on.

Carcharoth

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 4:33 AM, David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I removed the tag. It was added in 2009 by a usually reliable editor,
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harry_Kroto&diff=next&oldid=291030877],
> at a time when the bio had  only one indisputably reliable source, the
> Nobel biography, and a number of good sources marked as external
> links, such as a BBC interview with him, the profiles of him at his
> several universities, and a page listing him from the Royal  Society .
>  I consider the addditon  of the tag more than a little
> hyper-critical, and I'm surprised none of the many who must have seen
> it  did not take  the opportunity to remove it.  By now  the p. has a
> number of additional formal references documenting particular aspects,
> but the basic facts are all in the Nobel bio.
>
> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Harry Kroto.
>>>
>>> 'Kroto shared his views on what he calls the "GooYouWiki-Revolution"
>>> and spoke highly of Wikipedia as a resource.
>>> "In my field," said Kroto, "it's more reliable than the textbooks."'
>>>
>>> http://www.reflector-online.com/life/wikipedia-not-all-bad-even-sexy-1.2665094
>>
>> Though his article has been tagged since May 2009 with {{BLP sources}}.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Kroto
>>
>> I wonder if that is back of the backlog mentioned in other posts, or
>> an example of over-zealous tagging?
>>
>> I might try and tidy that article up if no-one else gets there first.
>>
>> Carcharoth
>>
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>
>
> --
> David Goodman
>
> DGG at the enWP
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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