[Foundation-l] Enforcing WP:CITE

Thu Dec 1 01:39:15 UTC 2005

Matt Brown wrote:

>I think there is a good deal of un-necessary panic going around about
>this USA Today thing.  Did it really tell us anything new?  No. 
>Misinformation in rarely visited articles has ALWAYS been a problem.
>  
>
Yes, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do anything about it. We know 
about it, now let's fix it.

>It's also not nearly as amenable to any kind of automated process as
>image tagging.
>  
>
What is wrong with my suggestion? Just because it doesn't work as well 
as image tagging doesn't mean that we shouldn't bother trying it at all.

>Let's not run around like headless chickens because some journalist
>found that conspiracy-theorist things had been put into his Wikipedia
>article.
>  
>
That journalist writes for the most read paper in the US. He tells 
everyone that Wikipedia is useless. People read that and believe that 
Wikipedia is useless. This is a fact that we have to face, not ignore 
out of pride.

>Fact is: Wikipedia's improving.  At quite a tremendous rate, in fact. 
>It's easy to forget (a) the magnitude of the task, and (b) how bad we
>were even a year ago.
>
We can easily get to a point in time when we will be overwhelmed by the 
number of editors and new content, and are wishing that we had taken 
some sort of measures early on, rather than sit back and boast about 
improvements.