On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Erik Moeller <e...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > 2009/4/1 doc <doc.wikipe...@ntlworld.com>: >> Is it perhaps time, that we started to demand that basic sourcing was a >> pre-requisite of creating an article on any living person? > > Without commenting on this specific proposal, I thought it interesting > that the de.wikipedia.org community implemented a fairly simple way to > drive more sourcing on all articles: They made the edit summary field > mandatory for new users, and have renamed it to "Summary and Sources", > making it clear in lots of places that edits without sources aren't > acceptable. If you look at anon recent-changes on de.wp, you'll notice > that this has led to lots of people including URLs, etc., directly in > their edit summaries. [1] This makes it at least a bit easier for > other users to decide on whether the edit was legitimate. > > [1] > http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Letzte_%C3%84nderungen&hideliu=1 > - As an interesting side note, the mandatory summary script doesn't > seem to trigger on section edits, and those are still very frequently > unexplained.
This is pretty great, and could be an easy, painless way to up sourcing across the board. Certainly, footnote syntax is so confusing that many people just don't bother; and this would probably help with identifying copyvios as well. A while (years?) ago the idea came up of using some sort of semantic form for new articles that included, explicitly, a box for sources; and I think that is a great idea as well. In the meantime, what about a link at the top of the create an article box to the code for a basic article that could be pasted in, including a refs section? Or a link to a step by step article creation tutorial, like on Articles for creation? I am all in favor of seeing if we can change people's behavior in subtle ways; it will take many solutions all working together to fix blp's. -- phoebe _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l