User:John Broughton/Wikipedia improvements - proposals and comments elsewhere

Unsourced articles
See Speedy deletion criterion for unsourced articles. I've commented (see talk page).

Worldtraveler comments
See User:Worldtraveller. Recommendations:


 * 1) Delete all articles which are unreferenced, six months from now.
 * 2) Make a lack of references after three days a speedy deletion criterion for new articles.
 * 3) Hide from the viewer all articles which have not been reviewed.
 * 4) Create a static version of some sort.
 * 5) Change AfD from requiring consensus to delete to requiring consensus to keep.

Media covers experimental German editing procedure
(From The Wikipedia Signpost, 28 Auguts 2006)

A feature to, by default, withhold displaying edits until the edits have been checked by a "trusted user", is set to be enabled on the German Wikipedia. Stories were published about the plan in the following publications:


 * Der Spiegel
 * CNet
 * ArsTechnica
 * BBC News

The BBC News piece was highly critical of the policy. In response to another user pointing out inaccuracies in the article, Jimbo Wales commented: "The journalist is typical of bad journalists. Running with only the slimmest of understanding, he pukes out his biases about how the world works with little concern for underlying facts."

Wikipedia quality initiative tested on German Wikipedia
CIO magazine covered the flagging system that will be tested on the German Wikipedia that has been called a "stable version" feature. Implementation is described as "users who have been registered for four days or more will be able to flag a recent entry as being correct and unvandalized... People will be able to update the entry with new material, but it won’t be visible as part of the main entry until another trusted contributor has flagged the updates as being correct." However, Wales is quoted as saying, "The exact details are still being worked out and the flagging system may be updated even after it goes live, depending on what works best."

From Wikipedia Signpost/2006-10-02/In the news

New speedy deletion criteria added
"We are the #14 website in the world. We are a big target. If we are to remain true to our encyclopedic mission, this kind of nonsense cannot be tolerated. This means the administrators and new page patrol need to be clear when they see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial - shoot on sight. There should be no question that someone who claims to have a "famous movie studio" and has exactly 2 Google hits - both their Myspace page - they get nuked. Ban users who promulgate such garbage for a significant period of time. They need to be encouraged to avoid the temptation to recreate their article, thereby raising the level of damage and wasted time they incur."

"Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go. I am here to tell you it is not enough. We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes. This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy. We must put a stop to this now."

Wikipedia Signpost/2006-10-02/More CSD

Discussion in wikien-l, December 2006
Message: 6 Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 12:03:24 +1100 From: "Steve Bennett"  Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] SOS -- Save Our Sources To: "English Wikipedia"  Message-ID:  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On 12/3/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm  wrote: > I've seen it happen and I'm pretty sure it continues to happen. Sometimes > websites disappear. Not that uncommon on the web, but it can be disastrous > for Wikipedia articles when those sites happen to be the source for an > article. I think there should be an organized effort to have pages for > uncommon sources cached and to replace dead links with their archived > counterparts. Is there such an effort yet?

I believe we should also have a way of making dead-tree sources available (through scans etc) for verification. Currently, we don't seem to have any way of uploading a scan of a page or whatever, simply for the purpose of verification. It wouldn't be for inclusion in the article itself, and possibly restricted to logged in users, but I would have thought this would easily satisfy "fair use".

The same mechanism should apply for web pages, where we can copy the relevant bits of a webpage and store them somewhere in case the website is no longer available. Archive.org is only a partial solution to that - and what if archive.org itself disappears?

Steve

Note: didn't get traction, probably because it's not focused on the right problem - newspaper and other articles that disappear, either into a paid archive or all together, and because the solution (common access) obviously won't work (it would need something like a small number of authorized users who would only be able to check the information - sort of like checkuser, though with limited update responsibilities - turning a URL into a full cite, and deleting unsupported information. (Editing to get stated info to be more accurate probably exceeds both volunteer available time and fair use limits.)   (JB-12/4/06)