[WikiEN-l] Contest and quality

Tue Sep 12 17:55:00 UTC 2006

One of the things that I've noticed is that articles (esp. in technical
subjects) are occasionally listed as unsourced when the sources are
textbooks (listed at the end of the article) that spend one or more chapters
on the subject, the information from which is distributed throughout the
article. Is there a policy somewhere that addresses this situation?

Carl

On 9/12/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> The following is a modified version of an announcement I posted on Recent
> Changes:
>
> Times have changed in Wikipedia. Once, our goal was to cover as much as
> possible, to reach a million articles, to be the biggest encyclopedia in
> the
> world. As Jimbo said in his talk at Wikimania, we have to start changing
> the
> focus from quantity to quality. We have to make sure that the key articles
> that
> we do have are as good as possible. Rather than getting another million
> articles, I believe that we need 100,000 more Feature-quality articles.
>
> Some numbers that were run yesterday show that we have over
> 230,000  without
> any sources whatsoever. That's almost 20 percent of our total articles
> without any sources. Even if we were to provide sources for 15 of these
> articles  an
> hour, it would take upward of two years to cover them all … and this does
> not
> include articles which are inadequately sourced or which contain spurious
> information, which raise this number by several orders of magnitude.
>
> Before suggesting that these are all stubs, I invite you to look at some
> examples: [[Amethyst]], [[Alto saxophone]], [[Alexander I of Russia]] (who
> fought against Napoleon), [[Italian literature]], etc., etc., etc.
> These  articles
> are the mainstay of a quality encyclopedia.
>
> This means is that there is a lot of work ahead of us. It is time to shift
> the focus. I therefore propose two solutions:
>
> 1. The field "Requests" on "Recent Changes" be changed to
> "Requested  feature
> articles." Instead of asking people to create brand new article,
> the  focus
> should be on improving existing articles.
>
> 2. Regular contests should be held to promote article improvement. To that
> end, I will donate $100 in books and media from Amazon to the person who
> most
> improves an unsourced article related to history or selected from
> [[Wikipedia:Vital articles]]. The contest will end on October 7. A panel
> of  judges will
> be selected to decide on the entries. For more information about  what
> constitutes an "unsourced article" please contact me. For
> historical  reasons, this
> will be known as "Danny's third contest."
>
> I hope to see as many people participating in this contest as participated
> in the previous two.
>
> Danny
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