Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Rrfayette

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[edit] Reply to Jreferee's assessment

This RfC cites posts of Rrfayette on articles. I looked over many of Rrfayette's rapid, voluminous posts. Just about all of them dealt with posting Unsourced and Verify templates on articles that did not sufficiently cite their references or sources and thus contained information that could not reasonably be verified. The Unsourced templates postings largely appear to be technically correct and supported by Wikipedia policy. The Verify template appears to require both that the contained information be unverified AND showing some sign of not being reliable. Information that is unverified does not necessarily mean that is also is unreliable. Rrfayette's posting of the Verify template may have been overkill. Any violation of Wikipedia policies and guidelines based on his Unsourced and Verify template posts appear to have been done unintentionally. Other than informing him of this overkill, there seems to be no reason to take RfC action based on this alone. My impression is that he largely is helping improve Wikipedia articles.

• I think you might be too generous on this point. If you look at his last tagging spree (which came after at least two editors commented that such actions were not helpful) you will see that he tagged 49 articles in a 14 minute span. Given that they are unrelated articles, they were probably identified using the random article feature. A significant number of these had perfectly decent references. I think it's safe to say that when someone is tagging at this rate, he's not even reading the articles and he's certainly not checking the reliability of the proposed references. It is just a way to make a point.Pascal.Tesson 19:54, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

• Most of the articles he tagged did not cite sources according to How to cite sources. (To get an idea on how to do this, see today's featured article references.) For example, look at the article Cadman Plaza. How can any editor reasonably verify each of the facts in the article? There are no references cited (at least nothing is placed under the heading of references). The internal Embedded HTML links do not appear to support the facts stated. Moreover, there is no direct relationship between each of the facts cited in the article and the external links listed. In particular, there is nothing to indicate which facts came from the Cadman Plaza Park Photos and which came from the Cadman Plaza article. And if another editor comes along, adds more facts from a third source, and merely puts a link to that source under External links, how are others supposed to figure out that the new facts came from the third external link and not the other two? Rrfayette correctly posted an Unsourced template. He did so without an edit summary, but its obvious as to why he made such a post. You reverted his post without discussion and without comment, which violates Wikipedia policy/guidelines. You may have been upset, but don't you think you pissed him off by your actions in the Cadman Plaza article? What makes it even worse is that you appear to have been mistaken in your reversal. Reverting Rrfayette's template post prevents others from being aware of the footnoting problem and fixing the problem. Rrfayette was not disputing the reliability of the proposed references, he was saying there is not enough relationship in the article between the facts posted and the references cited for them to be reasonably verified by others. A quick glance at an article is all you need to come to such a conclusion. As for his tagging spree, does it really matter how rapidly he posts his Unsourced template tags if he is correct? The wikibots are even faster. -- Jreferee 21:32, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the point of putting unsourced tags on every article without references (especially if tags are put on sourced articles as well). If there really was a point to that, why not just have wikipedia software add the tag automatically to every article without links? I'm also a bit puzzled by your comments that it's bad when someone makes a big change to a guideline or policy, but that the proper reponse is to leave it in the changed state instead of reverting it. --Milo H Minderbinder 22:11, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

What I am disputing is whether he actually did check that the references were not reliable or were not supporting the entire content. I think it's clear that in this case he did not. He tagged 6 articles at 8:41 including this one. So yeah, I'm disputing the fact that he did a conscientious job. A huge huge portion of articles on Wikipedia are undersourced, we're all aware of that. If you just hit the random button and tag everything as unsourced, you'll be "technically correct" almost all the time. Actually, we could have a bot tag every article that does not have a subsection called "References" with these tags. Why don't we? Because it's not constructive, it's not helpful, it would just be making a point. This is what at least two distinct editors tried to explain to him [1] [2] [3]. Sure, people were a bit agressive but that's the normal reaction when you are talking to a "new" account which clearly is a sock for some experienced user. Pascal.Tesson 22:21, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Jreferee, you mentioned that many of the articles did not cite sources according to How to cite sources. You might want to take a look at the section right above that, though: When to cite sources. For the most part, his edits ignored this entirely, apparently assuming that any article without a formal references section needed tagging. Not all articles require explicit citations of sources, especially if they contain external links or links to other articles with information on the subject. See below for a particularly good example of an article that really did not need an "unsourced" tag.--Srleffler 03:56, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the issue of changes to guidelines and policy, wholesale edits are considered disruptive. It's standard practice to undo changes that are not discussed, often without any kind of warning or notification to the user who made the changes. Due to their importance to the project, it's considere a Bad Thing for policy and guideline pages to be significantly changed or become unstable due to major editing without discussion. — Saxifrage ✎ 03:22, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

My favorite example of the problem with his tagging is this edit, where he tagged a one sentence stub article as "unsourced". While technically correct, in that the article cited no sources, the statement that Washington Township is one of 15 townships that make up Hardin County, Ohio is pretty basic, and pretty easy for Rrfayette to have verified himself if he had had any doubt. Making a large series of edits such as this one is disruptive, and appears to violate Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.--Srleffler 03:48, 21 November 2006 (UTC)