User:CaliforniaAliBaba/Ranting and raving

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[edit] Editing without sources

The habit of editing without bothering to cite your sources is extremely irresponsible and needs to be stigmatised just as strongly, if not more so, than making personal attacks. Effectively, it amounts to vandalism, and creates more pressure for responsible editors who have to go back and do the grunt work of looking for and reading lots of sources in order to fact check other people's edits. If you think something should be pointed out in an article but don't have a source, you should leave a note on the talk page. Registered users who add a "fact" without telling us what reliable source it came from should be warned with {{uw-unsor1}} through {{uw-unsor4}} and then blocked if they do it a fifth time. People who deliberately remove citation tags on frivolous grounds (e.g. because they're "ugly" or because none of the other alleged "facts" in an article have citation tags) should be banned. See the list of unsourced articles to which I've added references.

[edit] Acceptable sources

What constitutes an acceptable source for an article is based on the quality of the sources already present. In terms of fact-checking and peer review, scholarly articles in refereed journals are best, followed by books from academic presses, national newspapers and well-respected wide-circulation magazines, books from general publishers, and then all other sources. If you're editing an article whose sources are all scholarly books and papers, don't be surprised if you get reverted for adding an alleged fact from the Podunk Times or worse, the Podunk Web Weekly. On the other hand, if you're editing an article with absolutely no sources at all, or an article on which sources are very hard to find and information is limited, pretty much anything (besides a blog, a web-forum, or some other kind of personal website) represents an improvement. A source which is unacceptable in one article may be useful for filling out details in another article. Readers should judge the quality of a statement based on the quality of the source given to support it. Not all information in Wikipedia need be "weapons-grade reliable and pure", as long as it isn't just stuff that some Wikipedian made up or wrote based on his own personal knowledge.

[edit] Thoughts on AfD

1. AfD is a vote in which some voters are given more weight than others. Nothing wrong with recognising that. I find the terminology "!vote" to be rather condescending, but I don't quibble with people who use it as long as they respect others' right to use the simple name "vote".
2. AfD should be a collaborative process, not a war; a bunch of editors are putting their efforts together to decide whether a topic is encyclopedic or not. Every comment should contribute something to the discussion, and every comment should build upon the last ones. This implies that statements you make in AfDs should be verified to a similar extent as statements you make in actual articles; this way, people who come after you can look at the evidence behind your statements, and offer new evidence for everyone's consideration.
3. Nominators should demonstrate that they made some effort to find sources for the article, and that either none were found, or the ones found should be discounted (e.g. they're trivial, non-reliable, etc.)
   1. "No English sources" or "Not notable in English, only sources are in Japanese/Spanish/etc" are not acceptable reasons for deletion. English Wikipedia is a global encyclopedia containing facts verified by reference to reliable sources which may be freely available on the internet, stuck behind paywalls, in bookstores, or in libraries. English Wikipedia is not an American/British encyclopedia containing only facts which every monolingual Anglophone can verify by clicking a web link.
   2. A Latin alphabet search is a grossly insufficient attempt at looking for sources for topics related to foreign countries whose languages do not use the Latin alphabet.
4. If you're going to vote to keep an article, you should improve it to address the concerns listed by the nominator, or at least suggest how those concerns should be addressed.
   1. If the article is unsourced, add sources or at least point to them in your "Keep" vote.
   2. If the nominator is concerned the article can't develop in an encyclopedic direction regardless of how many sources are found, point to an example of an analogous article which has already been developed in an encyclopedic fashion (people who tell you this is WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS need to quit WP:BASHing WP:ATA all over the place).
5. If you're going to vote to delete an article, you should check who created it first:
   1. If the article was recently created by a newbie, keep WP:BITE in mind --- explain gently, using as few acronyms as possible, why it is impossible for the article to be developed in an encyclopedic direction. Possible reasons include subject matter or lack of sources, for example. Otherwise, if it is at all possible to help a new user reform a bad article into a good one, you should do so.
   2. If the creator was an experienced user, it's permissible to apply a higher standard:
      1. It's utterly irrelevant if the article was AfD'd only minutes or hours after creation; experienced users should know to have sources in hand and use them for every fact added to a new article starting from the very first edit.
      2. Articles lacking sources should remain in userspace until the creator can be bothered to find sources. An experienced user who wants his pet topic included bears the burden of convincing the rest of us that it should be included --- other users fall under no obligation to help him look for sources.
      3. If reliable sources are very easily found (e.g. lots of Google News or Google Books hits), then you probably shouldn't vote to delete the article, though the fact that sources are so easily found and the original creator didn't bother to add or use them reflects very poorly on him as a Wikipedian.
      4. However, if a subject has many Google web hits, but requires a lot of sifting through to find reliable sources among thousands of blogs and web-forums, it's the creator's job to do the sifting, not the AfD voters'; it's perfectly reasonable to vote "delete" because no one steps up to do the sifting.
      5. WP:DEADLINE cuts both ways. There is certainly no need for every article to be perfect from the moment it is started, or even a year after it is started, but by the same token, nor is there a need for Wikipedia editors to rush to fill out redlinks and leave behind lots of unsourced, hard-to-verify stubs written based on vague knowledge and stuff gleaned from other Wikipedia articles. If you feel pressured to create an article today, ask yourself why it can't wait a week, or a month, or a year, until you find some decent sources? Not having an article on a given subject may harm the project's reputation, but certainly not as much as having an incorrect one.