[WikiEN-l] Potential Wikipedian growing pains

Thu Sep 22 07:57:21 UTC 2005

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.