User:Visviva/Opinionations/Whom do we disserve?

Some Wikipedians take the view that unreferenced articles are "a disservice to the reader". I do not believe that this statement stands up to scrutiny, for the following reasons.


 * 1) The problem is not articles, but the content in them. If unreferenced content disserves the reader, it does so just as much whether it is embedded in a larger article or placed in a freestanding one. The principal difference is that unreferenced content buried in an otherwise cromulent article is much less likely to attract editor attention and cleanup.
 * 2) Most readers are not disserved by the mere absence of citations. First, the bulk of people interacting with Wikipedia content today are doing so directly through SERPs or virtual assistants, which do not preserve citations. And even those who do find their way to an article on wikipedia.org mostly read only the lead section, which often does not contain citations even in otherwise well-cited articles. Thus, the average user of our content is neither served nor disserved by the presence or absence of citations. Rather, when one editor adds accurate-but-uncited information to the wiki, the people they are chiefly disserving are their fellow editors, who will have to do extra work just to figure out where the information came from.
 * 3) The presence of citations does not indicate that the information the citations support is reliable or even verifiable. Many citations on Wikipedia do not in fact support the statement to which they are attached, or provide support only from suboptimal sources. The relationship between the citation and the statement can be checked, which is good, but there are very few people checking, which is bad.

This is not to say that unreferenced articles are not a problem; they are a significant problem that should be solved as quickly and efficiently as possible. But the underlying problem here -- one that goes far beyond unreferenced articles, or even unreferenced content -- is neglect. An excellently-cited article last touched by human hands in 2007 is likely far more of a disservice to the reader than an article that has been actively updated, but happens to contain a lot of unsourced content. And to solve neglect, we need people.

In 2006, many parts of this project that are now covered in cobwebs and mildew were home to thriving editor communities. Had those topical communities remained in place, the backlog of unreferenced articles today would be vastly smaller, perhaps even nonexistent. So to solve the problem of neglected articles, we need to understand the changes that took place circa 2007 and drove most of the editing community away, a catastrophic event from which the project has never recovered. And, if possible, to reverse those changes.

Looking out across the millions of neglected articles on Wikipedia, this can seem like an impossible problem to solve. But much of Wikipedia's early growth was on the foundation of content that had been neglected for nearly a century -- the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Comparing the Wikipedia of 2002 to the Wikipedia of 2022, and considering that most of that improvement took place in a few short years in the mid-2000s, the incredible power of open wikis to build on even very dated content is apparent.

If we can bring that engine back to life, the 15 years of neglect that this project has suffered can be cleared up in no time. Indeed, if we can just manage to stop driving people away, the problem of neglect, and the sub-sub-problem of unreferenced articles, will rapidly diminish.