[WikiEN-l] Next experiment: switch off AFD for a month. (was Guardian in defense of Wikipedia)

Tue Dec 13 16:44:52 UTC 2005

On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> > At least a month is better than forever, but I think a month is too
> > long to be manageable.
>
> I believe it's about the same amount of time we give suspected
> copyright infringements.
>
Suspected copyright infringements is a completely different situation,
though, because it invariably *requires* discussion.  That something
is not a copyright infringement cannot be easily proven, if at all. 
That something has a citation in it can be easily proven.

> > How about this: we list pages there for a month, but after 24 hours
> > the article gets moved to the user's subpage.  And let's add this: an
> > article doesn't get moved, even after 24 hours,  unless a member of
> > the "article referencing team" (or whatever) says that s/he has spent
> > a few minutes looking for a source and failed.  If no one bothers to
> > make a good faith search effort, the article stays in article space
> > for up to a month.
> >
>
> No need to userfy.  Just add an "unreferenced" tag.  This has the
> advantage of permitting casual visitors to find and improve the
> article.

I find the unreferenced tag to be useless.  Either it says that the
article contains some unreferenced facts, in which case we'd be better
off tagging those few articles which don't contain unreferenced facts
with the opposite tag, or it says that the article contains zero
references, which is already evident to anyone scanning the article
anyway.

If you want to put the tag on the talk page or use a category, in the
case of articles with absolutely no references, I wouldn't object. 
But I don't think that is a solution for what I'm saying, which is
that we shouldn't be creating such articles in the first place.

Anthony