Re: Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun

Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:36:11 -0600, Bryan Derksen
>> <bryan.derksenshaw.ca> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't see it as a good example, myself. The
edit in question was
>>> referenced with an appropriate and
well-formatted external source
>> A student email directory?  In what way is that not
original research?
> 
> Original research would have been if someone
"pieced together" what
> university she went to through indirect clues - for
example finding one
> source that says she lives in that city and another
source that says
> she's a student and concluding that that she therefore
goes to that
> _particular_ university.
> 
> In this case the reference is a primary source that
says "these people
> go to this university." A perfectly good reference
to cite when saying
> "this person goes to this university." That's
hardly a creative act of
> information synthesis.

No, I don't agree... even if this is what happened, and I
think this 
description is charitable in the extreme.

http://en.wikipedia.
org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Mugabe&diff=85665104&ol
did=85227651

Cites one page, which apparently does not now and never did
mention the 
name "Bona Mugabe" as if it has been changed, but
suggests that behind 
the login page you could still see the name.

Additionally, the name "Bona Mugabe" is likely not
unique in the world, 
so appearing in a list of students... how does that prove
anything?

This is exactly why we have a strong ban on original
research.

--Jimbo

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I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this
is crap, if it is 
still crap in 7 days I will delete it"

I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any
article that 
remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is
deleted". It 
sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not
articles? No, it 
will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable
step towards 
saying that it may be better to have no article for the
moment than a 
crap one.

Of course, if this was introduced overnight, we'd simply
have people 
that like deleting things tagging 400,000 articles, and we'd
have no 
chance of saving the easily sourced ones. I'd suggest a
phased approach, 
each phase introduced at a 2week to 1 month interval.

The phases could be:

1) Any article *totally* unreferenced and uncategorised may
be tagged as 
such, and if not fixed, deleted after 7 says. (Trial phase,
putting 
people on notice, most things would get saved by a simple,
and perhaps 
crap, cat or ref being added - little would actually
deleted)

2) Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the
subject's own 
pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.

2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking
sources (other 
than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and
deleted after 7 
days.

3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the
subjects own 
pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days

If we did it properly, we'd allow time to save most most of
the good 
things - and end up with a policy that said "all
unsourced articles get 
deleted"

Eventually we could tighten it further to demand some
quality in the 
sources.

It isn't a panacea, but it is a start - and it begins a
process of 
making inclusion dependent on article quality and not just
the 
notability of the subject. We need a thin end to our wedge
here - 
something workable and broadly acceptable to our more
inclusionist 
elements. Thoughts?

Doc



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