Wikipedia talk:Unreferenced articles/Archive 1

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Contents

Alternative user box design

UA This user helps with a drive to add citations to unreferenced articles.

Addhoc 16:16, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

  • I think adding a image or symbol or the letters "UA" brings the box more in line with other user boxes. What do others think? Jeepday (talk) 13:20, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
    • I like this user box better as well. Smee 04:50, 16 June 2007 (UTC).
    • It is a teensy bit too tall, though... Smee 04:51, 16 June 2007 (UTC).
  • I modified the text a bit, let me know what you think at the talk page for {{User Unreferenced Articles}}. Smee 09:17, 17 June 2007 (UTC).

Category:Articles lacking sources from June 2006

  • This list of statistics by letter is neat. I am going to take some of the lower ones, each day, add references, and see if I can't just eliminate some of the letters from the list... Smee 11:48, 17 June 2007 (UTC).
    • In other words, I'll begin to work on Y, U and V. Smee 11:50, 17 June 2007 (UTC).
  • You could add your name after the sections Y, U, and V if you wanted. Previously we have done that History and it is keeping with similar project trends Stub Sensor. Though I might suggest only signing up for one at a time, as other editors tend to not work claimed sections. Jeepday (talk) 13:44, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks, but nah, for now I'll just work piecemeal as I can. If others want to chip in, no worries. Smee 10:17, 18 June 2007 (UTC).

Deleting articles is wrong approach

Why are you trying to delete these articles? WP:DELETE specifically says not to. More specifically:

  • "If the page can be improved, this should be solved through regular editing, rather than deletion."
  • (under Reasons for Deletion)
8. Article information that cannot possibly be attributed to reliable sources
9. All attempts to find reliable sources to which article information can be verified have failed

Have you made good faith efforts to fix lack of references on each and every article you have subsequently PRODed or applied to have Speedy Deleted? Georgewilliamherbert 22:35, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

First I can only answer for myself and talk to the guidelines in this project. There are two answers to your question. Yes and No, there are a number of valid reasons to recommend articles for deletion and not all of them hinge on the validity of the article there are 75 speedy's in Category:Speedy_deletion_templates and none of them are for lack of references.
No - So no I do not make a "good faith efforts to fix lack of references on each and every article you have subsequently PRODed or applied to have Speedy Deleted". If I am working this project (currently we are working on articles that have had a {{unreferenced}} on them for a year or longer} and find an article that clearly needs a {{db-bio}} or {{db-spam}} I am going to put that template on the article. If an article that as it stands does not appear to have any hope of becoming encyclopedic and has had at template on it for a year that says in part "Any material not supported by sources may be challenged and removed at any time." I am going to be fairly liberal about applying WP:CSD and WP:V#Burden_of_evidence.
Yes - If the article appears to have any hope of becoming encyclopedic I am going to look for a reference take a look at Special:Contributions/Jeepday as of June 19, 2007 I have a pretty good record of adding references to articles. Sometimes the search for references leads a reason to put a {{db-copyvio}} or {{prod-nn}} on the article, sometimes like with Diff Jackson Lee Davis the article is savable other times it is not. As I type this "The English-language Wikipedia currently contains 1,843,072 articles". Having worked a lot of clean up projects I can tell you not all of them meet Wikipedia content policy.
Every editor is a volunteer, and I volunteer to help Wikipedia grow. We are all individuals who make different choices and occasionally we make mistakes. The goal if this project is listed in the second paragraph of the project space Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles, suggesting deletion of articles is not a goal, but occasionally it is requirement of our work. I am sorry if you feel angered by this projects attempts to improve Wikipedia, but please read the statement just below the edit box that is clearly visible every time a user adds content to Wikipedia "Content that violates any copyright will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. You agree to license your contributions under the GFDL*."
Now I ask you have you Georgewilliamherbert have you included references for each and every edit you have made to Wikipedia? Every time you saw an article that had a {{unreferenced}} or {{verify}} on it did you go out and make a good faith effort to find a reference? If you have a question or concern about a particular edit, article or editor please bring it up with the editor in question and please Assume good faith on the part of editors.

Signed Jeepday (talk) 03:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

When I first started, my approach was to post the {{find}} template on each article talk page to show what searches I had performed. Given the concerns expressed, I'll restart this approach - incidently I've still been performing the same searches - just not saving the template. Addhoc 09:47, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

verifiable

The wording of the edit box is the wording throughout wikipedia policy, and you are not following it here. Content must be verifiable--it must be able to be verified if challenged. It does not have to be initially verified. It is not now and it has never been acceptable to delete articles that have no references just because they have no references, nor to nominate articles for deletion on that ground alone. You need to know that it is not verifiable. There are only two ways you can say that: first, you made a good faith effort appropriate to the article and failed. The other if it is obvious from similar cases that the material is totally unverifiable. It is my experience at AfD that people who assume the second are as likely to be wrong as to be right, and that references can often be found when challenged, and could have been found had they been honestly looked for.

The goal of this project should simply be to find good references. Period. There should be another project to examine the articles for which references can not be found. In that project it should be considered whether the lack of references affect the possible notability of the subject. If so, it should be nominated for deletion. if not, it should be left alone for future work.

All WPedians will cooperate with a project having such goals. DGG 06:54, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

  • Support. -- Great post, I agree. Smee 07:17, 20 June 2007 (UTC).
  • The goal of this project is to find references for articles it has been on listed in the second paragraph of the project since the first day of the project History 16 May 2007. Currently there is another project to examine articles for which references can not be found. In that project it is considered by the community whether the lack of references affect the possible notability of the subject. Currently the project is AfD if you have an idea for a better project that people on this project could submit article to I would welcome it. You might look to Wiktionary:Requests for verification they use {{Wiktionary:tl|rfv}} to post the message This page has been listed on the requests for verification list. (Add entry to list.) It has been suggested that this entry might not meet Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion. If evidence is not provided within a month, the disputed information will be removed. See example atWiktionary:nouvelle illustration as long as you look quick before they delete it, or I attempt to reference it. Jeepday (talk) 01:39, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
Biographies of living persons can be nominated for deletion on grounds they are unsourced, provided they are negative in tone. Also, if after looking for sources, the article lacks non-trivial references, then it can be proposed for deletion. Otherwise agree with comments by Jeepday. Addhoc 09:55, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
The approach of removing material if not sourced by a given time makes sense only if applied to material that is for some reason suspect, or controversial. There is so much dubious material in Wikipedia that it makes sense to concentrate on the worst and the most dangerous and misleading. DGG (talk) 04:10, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Complaints

To the people who feel the wrong approach has been taken, please be more specific where you feel a member of this project has erred. I do not know how to answer your concerns with such general complaints as above. The variety of needs of articles in his category go beyond references or deletions. This category is pretty much a catch all for problematic articles and in going through it I feel we should do whatever is necessary, not limit ourselves to looking for sources. Most of articles simply get re-tagged with a more appropriate label because they already list a reference. From what I have been seeing more articles by far have been given new references than deleted. A few articles end up in deletion like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vibrational psychology and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zinc economy (2nd nomination). Some end up in copvio (because they match an external link), tagged with ((tl|db-bio}} (or the corp version because they do not claim notability), or {{prod}} (Mostly corporate spam but some oddball stuff too). Others go to the noticeboard for WP:BLP and get nominated for deletion from there. But please be more specific if you want us to reconsider our actions. Certainly you aren't complaining about the copyvio's being deleted, but I don't know which of the various decisions you disagree with. Asking us to do nothing but search for sources is impractical. The category must be cleaned up before it is useful enough to focus on sourcing, it is backlogged for over a year and over 70,000 articles. Surely you don't believe that any 70,000 articles, have no problems besides sourcing problems. Or that editors should ignore any such problems they come across. --BirgitteSB 09:26, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Good presentation Birgitte. Exactly what is driving this perception that this project is deleting article without references? Nothing in the project outline supports the accusations being made. Jeepday (talk) 01:22, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
Overall we have sourced many articles and deleted very few, I'm not sure what has caused this misconception. Addhoc 09:32, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
I finally figured out where all that was coming from [1]--BirgitteSB 19:31, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
It seems the thread starts here [2] with the comment "A Wikiproject to "eliminate unreferenced articles"?" by "Jossi Fresco" it begins with an unfair assessment of the project as an assumption. Jeepday (talk) 13:46, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

I posted a comment at User_talk:Jossi#Wikipedia_Unreferenced_articles and got a reply, it all stemmed from a misunderstanding of our goals History at User talk:Jossi, which has since been cleaned up. Jeepday (talk) 15:54, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Jooba

So here I am working Category:Articles lacking sources and I find this stub Jooba History, I look and find one reference BCC_K8 Lesson Plan.doc and do a merge and redirect to Clogging (History) and I move on. A little while later I flash back to a current AfD Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jacqueline Fitzsimon where clearly the only references found so far are sourced from wikipedia History. So how do I know that the one and single reference that I found for Jooba is not sourced from Wikipedia?

I would ask around on the talk pages of the best contributor's at Clogging if they have any info of Jooba. As a last resort take Jooba to AFD and see if anyone shows up there with better information. These examples are good reasons why this category should not be allowed to get backlogged to such a degree.--BirgitteSB 16:37, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
Please see WP:Merge -- any merge likely to be controversial should be proposed on the article talk page for 5 days--the success of this as any clean-up project is dependent on the good will of the editors. As a guide, any page being actively worked on in recent months should be discussed first. Better to discuss first, than defend it later. DGG (talk) 04:14, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Um the last non-bot edit to that article was Sept. 2006. Not even remotely being actively worked on. I don't think you really understand the situation being discussed here by your response, but in any event it was taken care of weeks ago.--BirgitteSB 12:47, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for verification

Please see: Wikipedia:Requests for verification

A proposal designed as a process similar to {{prod}} to delete articles without sources if no sources are provided in 30 days.

It reads:

This page has been listed in Category:Requests for verification.
It has been suggested that this article might not meet Wikipedia's core content policies Verifiability and/or No original research. If references are not cited within a month, the disputed information will be removed.

If you can address this concern by sourcing please edit this page and do so. You may remove this message if you reference the article.

The article may be deleted if this message remains in place for 30 days. (This message was added: 10 June 2008.)

If you created the article, please don't take offense. Instead, improve the article so that it is acceptable according to Verifiability and/or No original research.


Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)

Some editors see this as necessary to improve Wikipedia as a whole and assert that this idea is supported by policy, and others see this as a negative thing for the project with the potential of loss of articles that could be easily sourced.

I would encourage your comments in that page's talk or Mailing list thread on this proposal WikiEN-l: Proposed "prod" for articles with no sources

Signed Jeepday (talk) 14:02, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

  • I'll just add, that I agree with Jeepday, my friendly opponent in this, it would be better there than at dozens of different places. DGG (talk) 03:08, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Album and Movie references

What are some good "reliable sources" for music and movie references? I know Wikipedia guidelines suggest against linking to a site where you can purchase something (I can't find the policy right now -- but I know I read it a few days ago..), but a lot of the time sites like Amazon and Blockbuster seem to have the most complete info for CDs and movies, and since movies and CDs don't have an ISBN, I can't just reference them by ID number, either. For now I'll keep doing what I'm doing -- just looking for feedback so I can do it better. Spazure 05:16, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

The really good sources will not likely be online. Probably magazines from the time period of they were released, but I am not really familiar with these subjects. I am even less certain about moives, but my roommate subscribes to a heavy-metal magazine. I can't imagine that magazine on just heavy-metal could have much content, without detailed reviews of the newest albums released. Variety (magazine) is a film trade magazine, but I am not sure exactly what kind of material it covers.--BirgitteSB 18:49, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
I never thought to check magazines for music and film info, that's a great idea! Since I'd only need it for sourcing, I'll take a look at what's already available in my local library -- I already have a few things to look up next time I go in there anyway. Spazure 04:31, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

July 2006

Good news the Category:Articles lacking sources from July 2006 currently has only 2211 articles in it so once we finish June 2006, we should be able to make faster progress there. August 2006 also only has just over 2000 articles. Jeepday (talk) 17:55, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

User:SQL/Reflist

This User:SQL/Reflist is a list of articles, with <ref> tags in the article , but, no {{refs}}, {{reflist}}, {{reference}}, {{references}}, or, <references /> tags (or, similar...) and probably no reference section. This means they have references but the references are not showing. For the most part you can probably fix them by pasting in this

 ==References==
 {{reflist}}

Or just {{reflist}} if there is already a reference section. There are something over 15,000 of them they should go pretty fast if you are looking for something to do. We are looking to get a bot built to make the fix but have not found one yet. Jeepday (talk) 01:59, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Hey Jeepday, seems straight-forward. Rich Farmbrough, 09:23 11 September 2007 (GMT).
Rich would you like to build a bot and give it a test on this? If so I will work with you to problem solve it. If so make a post at User talk:SQL/Reflist and let's see what we can get done. Jeepday (talk) 02:13, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
This is done, BTW. Rich Farmbrough, 13:09 30 September 2007 (GMT). Did

Unreferenced to Refimprove

We have a bot to do some of the work here Wikipedia:Bot requests#Template:Unreferenced bot request. Tomorrow it should go look for references as identfied by an external link and if present change Unreferenced to Refimprove. 02:10, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

There was a delay but User:^demonBot2 is working on updating right now. Seems to be going great. additionally Smackbot is adding a reference section with a <references/> if there is a reference in the article that is not posting. Jeepday (talk) 23:02, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
There were technical difficulties when it came to {{unreferenced|section}} the bot will not be continuing to make that changes. I thank User:^demonBot2 for the effort on the project. Jeepday (talk) 23:39, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

{{Onesource}}

This template is adding to our category here which I do not find appropriate. What do others think?--BirgitteSB 14:13, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Also {{Specify}} which Iam definately changing.--BirgitteSB 16:37, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
{{Onesource}} goes to Category:Articles lacking reliable references which is the same as {{refimprove}} so that should be ok. I just looked and it seems CBM just changed {{Specify}} to Category:Articles needing more detailed references so that should be ok now. Good catch Brigitte :) Jeepday (talk) 03:00, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

What we really need . . .

Is a bot that changes all the {{Unreferenced|section*}} to {{Unreferencedsect*}} Or someone to rewrite the template to make the category conditional.--BirgitteSB 14:41, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Try bringing it up on Template talk:Unreferenced I would support either or both. Jeepday (talk) 23:41, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
I am running the first, and support both. Rich Farmbrough, 15:02 15 October 2007 (GMT).

Bring the list to you

User:Viriditas brought up an idea on my talk page that sounds interesting "It would be nice if a bot could distribute a block of ten articles, say twice a week to the talk page of project members". I think this is a great idea but it has challenges in providing the most current articles to the user. I remember seeing {{Qxz-ads}} from Template:Wikipedia ads
Wikipedia Ads file info – show another – #33

and got thinking could we build a box or template that shows 10 random articles from the oldest Category:Articles lacking sources. It could be placed on your user page and would refresh bringing up new articles every time you opened your page and/or pushed a "refresh" button. The bot is doable I think but an auto refresh from the category is going to have less articles that have already been fixed (and you can do more then 10). Thoughts? Jeepday (talk) 02:43, 11 October 2007 (UTC)