David Gerard wrote:
See, a lack of references is a real problem with Wikipedia's reliability
and perceived reliability. That means you have nothing to start with on
seeing if an article has a source or is just off the top of someone's head.
It might be crap with a reference that doesn't support it, but at least
then you have a chance to find out.
This particular tag seems a little redundant, because the presence
or absence of references is pretty obvious when one is looking at
an article. If the purpose of the tag to build up a category of
articles for bored WPians to fix up, why not just add a simple
"[[Category:Add references]]" to the bottom of the article?
Not in readers' faces, still allows building up of the list to
work on.
Or we could borrow the strategy of the recently-successful
untagged images project, and use tools to build up a mega-list
of articles missing "References"/"External links"/"Further
readings"
sections. All those US cities should just be able to have a
boilerplate cite of the US census, etc. Seeing a lot of unsourced
articles listed together should help inspire new techniques for
efficient referencing too, just as the tagging project engendered
a number of useful new image tags that have replaced the mishmash
of license statements that people used to use.
Stan