[Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

Thu Nov 3 11:22:45 UTC 2011

> This demands far too much of newbies.  We can sometimes be very
> cult-like in our demand for references and sources.

Verifiability is central to Wikipedia, and it should not be otherwise.
If we have editors who do not understand what a reliable source is, they
need to be educated.  If they don't care about that kind of thing, and
are scared off by our demands for reliable sources, we might be scaring
away the people who should be scared away. Where do I go to join the
cult?

> If you want to scare away newbies you do that very well by thrusting
> him into a highly subjective debate about the nature of reliable
> sources.

Sure, it's subjective.  Reinforcing the common misconception that a URL
is a citation is not what we should be doing, though.

> I too would prefer books and articles. I'm also sure that some of the
> references provided will be bad.  A reference is what it is, but it
> would be badgering newbies to ask them how they know that something is
> true.

Perfectly true - a better wording is needed.

> What we want to instill here is the good habit of references, and out
> of good faith trust that editors are not inventing their references.
> *Keep it simple.*

Made-up references are not a big issue: it's wildly unreliable
references taken from a cursory google web search that are the problem.

> A tool that ask whether the reference is from a book, a journal, the
> web or something else is good for a different reason. The choice would
> lead to different drop-down boxes where only the relevant questions
> would be asked.

A very useful advantage; true!

> A lot of the books that I have are pre-ISBN.

Also true - at that point I'd always just filled in the form, but of
course now I know about reftag...

David