Ray Saintonge saintonge at
telus.net wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
>Nowadays I pretty much tell new contributors
"just write a few
>paragraphs and INCLUDE REFERENCES and don't worry about the fancy
>markup for now. Just INCLUDE THE REFERENCES and people will know it's
>a real article about a real thing."
Absolutely! Speaking as the one who has been pushing
the POV on
Wiktionary that even vocabulary needs to be referenced, I am amazed by
the people who consider some number of Google hits as evidence. Some of
the most common offending terms are those that seek to rename sexual
practices, or characterize some kind of on-line activity. A large
proportion of these terms may indeed be valid, but that requires some
kind of documentation to distinguish them from something that the
contributor just made up for the occasion.
I've just edited [[Wikipedia:Your first article]] accordingly.
By the way, that page was UNRELENTINGLY negative before I did. Jeez,
we want to *encourage* good new editors. And it needs a severe
tightening of the writing. It's a perfect example of instruction
creep. Could a good writer please hack it up?
- d.