I find it hard to believe that you read anything that I actually said.
You've completely misrepresented my points in two substantial ways.
1) You talk about "non-referenced facts", while I am talking about
non-referenced articles. Not just facts that don't have sources,
entire articles without a single reference to anything outside the
encyclopedia. 2) You talk about how it's impossible for us to fix
"every unreferenced article" within 24 hours. But I am not talking
about *old* unreferenced articles, I'm talking about *new ones*.
Fixing all the unreferenced articles we currently have will be hard,
and it will take a long time. But we'll never get finished if we keep
creating new ones.
This isn't a quick fix. It's the first step in a long process.
Anthony
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/15/05, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
The crux of the problem is in what the endgame
should be for an
unreferenced article. Is it deletion or improvement? I would easily
support improvement. If an article is unreferenced that does not imply
that it is wrong; we just don't know if it's right.
There's no question over the endgame. The question is over what to do
in the meantime. If we don't know whether or not something is right,
it shouldn't be in an article. Doesn't mean it can't be in user
space, or on a talk page, or in the edit history, or in the deleted
articles history. That's my interpretation of
[[Wikipedia:Verifiability]], anyway.
We can begin with some kind of "unreferenced" tag, maybe even a
flashing
red "CAUTION" sign. :-)
Beyond that, we need to remember that most of our non-referenced facts
aren't controversial at all. Look at how long it has taken to put
category tags on all articles. That's a much simpler task than
referencing. Of your four suggestions only putting material on the
article's talk page will even give a sporting chance for review. If you
outright delete an unreferenced article there will not even be a link to
Xxxx's talk page so that the material can be reviewed and documented.
Have fun finding it!
Assuming good faith needs to be extended to the articles themselves. It
recognizes that a contributor who was himself deceived by the
information was probably acting in good faith. Fact checking an article
is a tedious process that needs to apply to every statement in an
article. It may be easy enogu to have a bot tag every unreferenced
article with a notice that if it is not referenced in 24 hours it will
be deleted. If ALL of us were to devote ourselves to that task for that
24 hours without sleeping there would still not be enough of us for the
job. So when your second bot comes along and clears out the still
referenced articles what would we have left? We need common sense, not
impatience.
Actions
based on a deletion endgame consistently attract bitter disputes
and needless stress. In planning new strategies this should be
considered from the beginning. in the hope of avoiding the stress.
Without that this will be no different from AfD.
Ec
The endgame in either case is a well referenced article. The question
is how do we get there.
Of course, but we can't depend on any kind of quick fix.
Ec