[Foundation-l] Wikipedia ... but where are you going ... (was:Enforcing WP:CITE ...)

Sat Dec 3 15:26:29 UTC 2005

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
>   
>> Fine ... wonderful .... so just go ahead restricting contributors - go 
>> into your dead-end position and you will see that Wikipedia will follow 
>> Nupedia - and that someone considered a bit mad will just take over the 
>> contents and allow people to edit like it was done up to now.
>>     
>
> Requiring people to add references does not needlessly restrict them. It improves the content. We
> are here to serve a goal; create the world's largest and best free encyclopedia. Adding references
> helps us toward that goal. 
>
> Nupedia was on one end of the spectrum and Wikipedia is on the other. Nupedia died because it was
> too restrictive. Wikipedia needed to be very open in order to encourage growth. That was fine when
> we were small and hardly anybody knew of us or used our content. Now things have changed; millions
> of people use Wikipedia every month and expect it to be accurate. Requiring references helps us
> attain higher quality.
>   
When you start *requiring *references, you will move from one side of 
the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum. Having a blind belief in 
references is as bad as not referencing at all. The references you come 
up with are probably English and you cannot truly appreciate sources in 
other languages. Your ideas about Wikipedia are about the English 
Wikipedia. This is the Foundation mailing list and as a consequence I 
take it that you want to have references on all Wikipedia projects. 
Again it is a sure way of killing off our less mature projects.
>  
>   
>> Come on: let them talk - let's just go ahead working without listening 
>> to them doing our best. The day is not far and they will need to stop 
>> because Wikipedia will show them that liberty and democracy survives any 
>> attack.
>>     
>
> We are already famous, so bad press is simply bad (esp right before a fund drive). But beyond
> that, this particular incident showed a place where our review system failed and failed badly. 
>
> If we required references, then somebody from RC patrol would have tagged the the offending
> article as unsourced and subject to eventual deletion. That tells readers to not at all trust what
> is in that article and encourages editors to check the article and add references. I see nothing
> wrong with that. 
>
> Like it or not we are being used as a major reference source. Readers rely on us to be accurate.
> Adding references helps us do that. 
>
> -- mav
When we are so famous, why is it that maybe 3% of the Italians know 
Wikipedia .. Why do you think we have so few resources where we could 
make a difference.. We may be relevant in English but with a similar 
resource in Kannada, or Osetian we would be truly relevant. We would be 
relevant because we would define a genre.

I am sorry but in my opinion this whole thing is too inward looking. You 
do not appreciate the potential fallout of all this.

Thanks,
    GerardM<