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

Tue Dec 13 16:58:13 UTC 2005

On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> 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.

That isn't the right question.  It's not whether somehting is
*verified*, it's whether it's *verifiable*.  It's  wiki.  Lack of
references (as in the very earliest version of the article Oxygen, see
the addendum to
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oxygen&oldid=271622) can be
solved by editing.  It can never be solved by deletion, which should
be reserved for articles that seem, after an honest effort has failed,
to be unverifiable.

> > > 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
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