Wikipedia talk:CiterSquad/Archive 2

Dissenters
The section CiterSquad in it's current configuration does not seem appropriate for the project space. There is a lot of discussion and opinion that is more appropriate for the talk page. I propose moving the entire section here, than adding a section to replace it with something like "Support Referencing but not tagging", The major objection is against users (like me) who tend to tag more articles in Category:Articles lacking sources (Erik9bot) than to add references. Please note that both actions are supported by the project goals and Wikipedia policy, I would hate for personal disagreements to discourage potential volunteers. I also encourage all editors to challenge any editor (myself included) if they beleive any edit is not keeping with Wiki-policy. Jeepday (talk) 23:24, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Dissenters

 * It's only a cleanup project if you are actually adding references. Stamping articles with tags actually makes a bigger mess, since you are leaving redundant instructions for someone else to do work. Please read the talk page before taking part in this project, since there is significant dissent.  Some of us think this project is a waste of time. Antandrus  (talk) 05:33, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Not true Antandrus! Wikipedia is an emergent phenomenon in a human complex adaptive system.  Since all editors are volunteers, they will each, by virtue of the nature of their interests, work on quite different aspects of what it takes to construct a great online encyclopedia resource.  The core Wikipedia policy of verifiability makes it explicit that the "Burden of Evidence" is on the editor who wants to add (or retain) an assertion to (in) a Wikipedia article.  Some editors will want to make assertions about Garithaianik; other editors, who might not know a thing about Garithaianik nor be interested in learning, will merely want to make Wikipedia (in the aggregate) a more reliable resource in the long term by gradually, in an often slow and evolutionary manner, making explicit the unreferenced state of  the Garithaianik article, getting a date assigned to that state by SmackBot, and allowing interested editors in that article, or that category of articles, to fix it if they wish.  I put myself squarely in the latter category.  I simply want to take a very small action that sets articles up for future improvement, or AfD if necessary, in future months and years.  Thus, on the contrary to your assertion, It is very much a cleanup project if an editor carefully tags an article for additional attention that, per community consensus, is one small step in a multi-step and concatenate article improvement process.N2e (talk) 23:32, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * So are you going to help add cites, or just splatter huge "unreferenced" tags everywhere? You do realize that it is ten to a hundred times harder and more time-consuming to add cites, yes?  Are you going to help, or just assign busywork to other people?  Antandrus  (talk) 00:38, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * To all of the rest of you: if you feel you must add drive-by "unreferenced" tags to articles, please have the courtesy at least to look for at least one cite.  This will help the encyclopedia.  Otherwise, you are leaving an unsightly blemish that is unlikely ever to be corrected.  Tags, banners, and such are multiplying orders of magnitude more quickly than cites are being added.  Think about it!  You want to improve Wikipedia, right?  Please help -- and not by hanging a sign around that poor hitchhiker in the sun, "hey, give this person a ride"!  You too can help, even though it is harder work to find cites than it is to spend ten seconds adding a tag.  Antandrus  (talk) 00:51, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed with Antandrus -- to potential volunteers, please know that there is significant opposition to this project, but there is still much one can do to help Wikipedia in the realm of citations; but that adding citations, prose, and bibliography will ultimately help the encyclopedia much more. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 02:15, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Also dissent. Please improve articles, not "identify" articles to be improved. It is not hard to find articles to improve: they're everywhere. Outriggr (talk) 02:17, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * It's important for readers to identify that some articles need improvement, that they are still incomplete, and not to take it for face-value. Wikipedia is a work in progress -- &oelig; &trade; 03:36, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Forgot to mention, there's already long-standing consensus regarding maintenance tags: Perennial proposals. -- &oelig; &trade; 02:18, 4 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm a reader as well as an editor and I find the tags annoying. And as an editor, I judge that project is totally useless.  It's already quite plain when an article is undersourced; you just have to read it.  Opus33 (talk) 04:06, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * [[Image:Nuvola gnome-fs-trash-full.svg|25px]] Rejected [[Image:Symbol declined.svg|20px]] Unnecessary Also dissent. My opinion as a reader is that the tags are patronising, distracting and ugly.  My opinion as an editor is that they are usually useless, and always in the wrong place.  --RobertG ♬ talk 07:48, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Per the above, it's truly patronising to believe that readers and editors can't spot an article has no references without the aid of Citersquad. --Folantin (talk) 18:53, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm strongly in favour of a project that does some work. I'm not in favour of a project that asks other people to do the work. Come on! Either get your finger out and do a google, or put find on the talkpage which will help the useful people do the work. But putting an unreferenced tag on an article is not helpful. There are 145,811 articles with that tag. Creating another 100,000 is not going to help the 145,811 that already exist. The target should be - deal with the untagged articles first.  SilkTork  *YES! 18:59, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm with the above. Please don't carry this out. Protonk (talk) 00:23, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Per a request for clarification, I'll point out that I'm not opposed to referencing but I am instead opposed to the creation of templates for a very broad class of articles where the fact pointed out by the template is self-explanatory. Templates, when they work at all, work best on narrow disputes or problems (incidentally, one question I ask friends and family who use WP as a resource but do not edit is "Do you pay attention to templates on the top of articles or in article sections?  Do they make you judge the content differently?"  The answer to the first questions is invariably "sometimes" and the answer to the second is invariably "no".  The plural of anecdote is not data, of course, but I find if very difficult to support a project which will drop a template on the top of more than a hundred thousand articles if we have no clear indication that said templating produces results. Protonk (talk) 00:16, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, for the clarification. Having worked Unreferenced articles for about 2 years now, I find that about one third to half of the articles that still have unreferenced on them still have the template and now have references. Not to mention the many tags that are removed by editors once tags get added.  Of the articles that don't get references added about 10% end up being unreferencable and get deleted, and the rest referenced, by project volunteers. Jeepday (talk) 00:26, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to add that if I were making a repetitive series of edits to Wikipedia and found that a variety of unrelated, established editors objected to them and took considerable effort to voice their objections, I would probably stop. This is very brazen of you. You have moved this "dissenting" segment to the talk page. In its place you put the heading "Editors opposed to Wikipedia:Verifiability and/or WP:BURDEN", which is a strawman, and frankly insulting. None of us oppose these principles. I oppose your ridiculous, thoughtless implementation of these principles. I assume at some point you'll be deleting all sentences on Wikipedia that don't have a footnote after them, because this is exactly where you're heading. The logic of your arguments and your actions lead you there. You have to examine these things. (Just commenting--I am not asking for a reply.) Outriggr (talk) 00:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)


 * So your saying it is ok for an editor to place unreferenced once a day, but there should be a limit to doing it to much? Every argument against this project, has been an argument against a Wiki-policy or consensus, Every reader is a potential editor and the maintenance tags give potential editors ideas of how to improve an article. The tags also serve as warnings to readers about potentially problematic and low-quality content..  I encourage you to question and seek change for those polices you don't agree with, but this is not the place, you need to address the policy on the policy page. Jeepday (talk) 00:34, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I think he's saying (and I can be moved to agree) that there is a shift in how we ought to view large scale actions versus small scale actions. There are a bevy of differences between adding an unreferenced tag to one article a day and adding them to a thousand articles a day, just as there is a difference between fishing off a dock and deep sea trawling.  It doesn't suit discussion to trivialize the complaint by offering some unrecognizable threshold.  If the 'tagging' half of the project consists of finding articles which contain no reference calls or reference/note/etc. end sections but contain no unreferenced template and templating them, then a criticism that no value is derived from a bulk exercise like that can be valid.  At some edit rate we must assume that an editor is no longer making a decision about the need for a template and is simply processing the queue.  Whether that edit rate is 10 articles an hour or 10 articles a minute is immaterial.  A number of editors in good faith object to the process of adding the unreferenced tag at a high rate, that would certainly disqualify the use of AWB for it and could raise other problems. Protonk (talk) 00:51, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * There are just as many fish in the ocean, if you fish of the dock or use a trawler. Attacking a project because someone, Might do some thing bad is a failure to assume good faith. I personally review articles, and add tags or references. Everything I do I do because I think it helps Wikipidia. Sometimes I make mistakes, or am less clear then I should be User_talk:Jeepday.  Sometimes I find an article that just seems like it is made up Z-value and check for references thinking I am going to be adding prod-nn, and end up adding cite book and sometimes I find articles like Negation theory and Nopi. There is nothing in this project counter to Wiki-policy.  If there is a disagreement with an editors edits, there are avenues for addressing that. There are avenues for changing policy.  Now I am getting emails from editors who are afraid they will "incent the trolls", if they try and add a reference or unreferenced, that is just wrong. The thing about Wikipedia is the edit history is there for everyone to look at, check mine Special:Contributions/Jeepday. You are saying there is a line to assume bad faith At some edit rate we must assume that an editor is no longer making a decision about the need for a template, name it, define it, find an editor who violated it and take them to Administrators' noticeboard or the appropriate place, in the mean time please assume good faith. Jeepday (talk) 01:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * It isn't a failure to assume good faith to argue that actions might have negative consequences. I assume all you folks mean well and want to improve the encyclopedia.  Since that is a baseline for discussion I failed to explicitly note it as a caveat in my comments.  I want to reiterate my insistence that search for a specific threshold is based on a specious argument.  Edit rate matters.  A task undertaken at a low rate doesn't run afoul of some of the same problems that a task undertaken at a high rate would (or through some automation).  Either way it is besides the point.  No one is suggesting that you not add references to articles or not challenge unreferenced material.  What we are concerned about is the proliferation of the unreferenced template.  A wikiproject whose main goals include adding this template to articles should (I think) be confronted with some resistance, as the template itself is of little value and any template loses value the more times it is transcluded.  Don't conflate those arguments with some imagined hostility against normal editing. Protonk (talk) 01:57, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

(unident) Any action might have negative consequences. If an editor has a problem with unreferenced then see Templates_for_deletion/Log/2007_September_1, and post it again. The page Perennial proposals is full of actions that might have negative consequences and do, reapeadaly like Prohibit anonymous users from editing. anonymous editors and registered users alike, vandalize Wikipedia every minute of everyday. But we assume that the majority will improve Wikipedia, and they do. I don't understand what you mean by "proliferation of the unreferenced template" there is without doubt a proliferation of unreferenced articles, in the hundreds of thousands of them. It has been suggested that some of them don't actually need references Wikipedia_talk:CiterSquad, though no one actually wants to change the policy. It has also been argued recently that we should not tag any more articles until all the ones already tagged have references. So why are we here, if not to improve Wikipedia and help other improve it. If some editors choose to improve Wikipedia by volunteering here, then support that. Sure voice you opinion and form policy or consensus, but this is not the place. Arguing here, and posting "this project is a waste of time" is not constructive it disvalues other peoples values, and is counter to WP:AGF. Some do think it has value, though most have run off after being repeatedly bitten. There is a lot of unproductive criticism, most of it personal opinion, on this talk page. None of the criticism points to a single edit that has been counter to policy. There has been significant talk that crosses or is boarder line on Do not use the talk page as a forum. It is not ok to argue about policies you don't agree with here, this is not the place to make a change to policy you don't agree with. Jeepday (talk) 02:45, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't agree. Arguing that this project (or more specifically, the side of it involved w/ tagging articles) is a waste of time is neither failing to AGF nor biting newcomers.  It is a statement of opinion about efficacy of an action.  As for the pointer to the TfD or WP:PEREN, I am not convinced by either of those arguments.  First, the perennial discussion you link to regards removing templates from article space.  I can support the use of templates in article space while still making the narrower argument that some templates are less useful than others and that templates which apply to hundreds of thousands of articles and announce something self evident (in comparison to a hoax template or unreliable sources template) are the least useful of all. Protonk (talk) 02:55, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

inline citations
I just noticed Obed_(Bible) tagged by this project. It lists the specific Biblical reference right in the first line. Seems like it would have been just as easy to format the citation as to tag the article. Not R (talk) 20:11, 11 September 2009 (UTC)


 * You are correct, That reference should have been formatted instead of the article being tagged as unreferenced. Jeepday (talk) 23:02, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

"Most people don't volunteer to add references because adding references is hard. improving content is hard.  Tagging is relatively easy.  Not tagging is even easier and discussing things is the easiest of all." User:Protonk

Dissenters

 * It's only a cleanup project if you are actually adding references. Stamping articles with tags actually makes a bigger mess, since you are leaving redundant instructions for someone else to do work. Please read the talk page before taking part in this project, since there is significant dissent. Some of us think this project is a waste of time. Antandrus (talk) 05:33, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Not true Antandrus! Wikipedia is an emergent phenomenon in a human complex adaptive system. Since all editors are volunteers, they will each, by virtue of the nature of their interests, work on quite different aspects of what it takes to construct a great online encyclopedia resource. The core Wikipedia policy of verifiability makes it explicit that the "Burden of Evidence" is on the editor who wants to add (or retain) an assertion to (in) a Wikipedia article. Some editors will want to make assertions about Garithaianik; other editors, who might not know a thing about Garithaianik nor be interested in learning, will merely want to make Wikipedia (in the aggregate) a more reliable resource in the long term by gradually, in an often slow and evolutionary manner, making explicit the unreferenced state of the Garithaianik article, getting a date assigned to that state by SmackBot, and allowing interested editors in that article, or that category of articles, to fix it if they wish. I put myself squarely in the latter category. I simply want to take a very small action that sets articles up for future improvement, or AfD if necessary, in future months and years. Thus, on the contrary to your assertion, It is very much a cleanup project if an editor carefully tags an article for additional attention that, per community consensus, is one small step in a multi-step and concatenate article improvement process.N2e (talk) 23:32, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * So are you going to help add cites, or just splatter huge "unreferenced" tags everywhere? You do realize that it is ten to a hundred times harder and more time-consuming to add cites, yes? Are you going to help, or just assign busywork to other people? Antandrus (talk) 00:38, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * To all of the rest of you: if you feel you must add drive-by "unreferenced" tags to articles, please have the courtesy at least to look for at least one cite. This will help the encyclopedia. Otherwise, you are leaving an unsightly blemish that is unlikely ever to be corrected. Tags, banners, and such are multiplying orders of magnitude more quickly than cites are being added. Think about it! You want to improve Wikipedia, right? Please help -- and not by hanging a sign around that poor hitchhiker in the sun, "hey, give this person a ride"! You too can help, even though it is harder work to find cites than it is to spend ten seconds adding a tag. Antandrus (talk) 00:51, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed with Antandrus -- to potential volunteers, please know that there is significant opposition to this project, but there is still much one can do to help Wikipedia in the realm of citations; but that adding citations, prose, and bibliography will ultimately help the encyclopedia much more. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 02:15, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Also dissent. Please improve articles, not "identify" articles to be improved. It is not hard to find articles to improve: they're everywhere. Outriggr (talk) 02:17, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * It's important for readers to identify that some articles need improvement, that they are still incomplete, and not to take it for face-value. Wikipedia is a work in progress -- &oelig; &trade; 03:36, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Forgot to mention, there's already long-standing consensus regarding maintenance tags: Perennial proposals. -- &oelig; &trade; 02:18, 4 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm a reader as well as an editor and I find the tags annoying. And as an editor, I judge that project is totally useless. It's already quite plain when an article is undersourced; you just have to read it. Opus33 (talk) 04:06, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * [[Image:Nuvola gnome-fs-trash-full.svg|25px]] Rejected [[Image:Symbol declined.svg|20px]] Unnecessary Also dissent. My opinion as a reader is that the tags are patronising, distracting and ugly. My opinion as an editor is that they are usually useless, and always in the wrong place. --RobertG ♬ talk 07:48, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Per the above, it's truly patronising to believe that readers and editors can't spot an article has no references without the aid of Citersquad. --Folantin (talk) 18:53, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm strongly in favour of a project that does some work. I'm not in favour of a project that asks other people to do the work. Come on! Either get your finger out and do a google, or put find on the talkpage which will help the useful people do the work. But putting an unreferenced tag on an article is not helpful. There are 145,811 articles with that tag. Creating another 100,000 is not going to help the 145,811 that already exist. The target should be - deal with the untagged articles first.  SilkTork  *YES! 18:59, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm with the above. Please don't carry this out. Protonk (talk) 00:23, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Erik9
FYI -
 * Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive566
 * Bot_requests
 * Jeepday (talk) 17:51, 26 September 2009 (UTC)


 * So what will this mean for the wikiproject? -- &oelig; &trade; 03:25, 27 September 2009 (UTC)


 * There is a request to find a new bot, and to rename the category and keep it updated. If that happens no problem.  If there is not a replacement then the category and the 140,000 articles should stay as they are, nothing new will get added and referenced articles won't get removed except by people.  In the short term (6 to 12 months) there is not a significant impact to the project.  After 12 months the number of articles that have been referenced but still have the Category:Articles lacking sources (Erik9bot), will start to grow, we will find ourselves going to more articles that have been referenced but the category has not been removed from them. Just guessing based on experience from other projects; in the 18 to 24 month time-frame without a bot, peoples' frustration of not having the category kept updated may start to grow, and we can discuss how to proceed at that point.  So for the next few months to couple years, we just keep at it, reexamine as needed and if you start to note any problems or have a brilliant idea bring it to the talk page and we can work it out. Jeepday (talk) 19:38, 27 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Agreed. I don't have a problem working through the articles in the category and adding references, maybe this will give us time to catch up. -- &oelig; &trade; 04:23, 28 September 2009 (UTC)


 * No problem, 140,000 divided by 730 (days in two years) = 192 a day. Jeepday (talk) 20:59, 29 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay maybe not catch up completely, but at least put a little dent in it :) -- &oelig; &trade; 00:05, 3 October 2009 (UTC)


 * can we turn this thing off (Erik9bot)

Is it possible to turn this thing off ... I come across its stupid auto tag in one in 5 articles i read lately .it places {Unreferenced} even if all is ok with notes..it has tag almost 150.000 articles since june of this year..... The last thing Wikipedia needs is all there articles looking invalid. We already have a problem with new users spending hours a day tag with {Unreferenced|tag} for no reason at all..and not really helping wikipedia with real contributions but spamming tags..i see that this bot has gone crazy. As more and more of this tags are added the less ans less reliable wikipedia looks in the eyes of the world...i\I can tell you that when i first starting reading wikipedia i would not read an article that had {Unreferenced|source tag}...now i see them every were. Pls stop this thing and i also think that should not be the header of any article...if article is that bad it should be deleted. Buzzzsherman (talk) 20:26, 30 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Huh? It's been off for a week now.. and it didn't place any tags, just a hidden category. -- &oelig; &trade; 00:08, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest that the category be deprecated, I was never happy with having it based on a specific bot - it reduced the value of the bots work effectively (almost) to producing a list. Citer Squad would/will have plenty to do with the standard/BLP unreferenced categories. I propose to do a preliminary scan and remove the cat from articles with one of the unreferenced tags or an obvious cite. After that, we can perhaps migrate the articles to the normal structure. Rich Farmbrough, 19:16, 6 October 2009 (UTC).


 * Sounds good. -- &oelig; &trade; 16:06, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Ok I made some adjustments to the "Citer Squad" page - added some progress boxes from other reference-needing categories and updated it a bit. I also removed about 1400 articles from the category that would not have been eligible if Erik9bot  were running now - i.e. they have a reference or something like one - an ISBN, a url, etc.
 * I have done some analysis on the category, most of the articles (90%+) are from 2006-2007. I can move them across to the existing monthly categories easily enough, I have done extensive manual testing, if necessary we can have a "bot=yes" field to hide the tag, or do as consensus dictates, if the "tags are ugly" meme trumps the "tags are necessary" one.
 * I will file a BRFA for this. Rich Farmbrough, 00:09, 10 October 2009 (UTC).


 * Wonderful, thanks Rich. If you could post a link to the BRFA I'd like to keep an eye on its progress. -- &oelig; &trade; 19:31, 10 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Anything happen on Rich's Proposal above for a BRFA? Jeepday (talk) 23:40, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

I didn't post it, been a bit busy. Will drop a line when I do. Rich Farmbrough, 20:11, 29 October 2009 (UTC). Rich Farmbrough, 17:14, 1 November 2009 (UTC).
 * Bots/Requests_for_approval/SmackBot_XXI


 * Well the BRFA is stalled. The "no tags here" brigade mainly. Which is crazy because they should be off at VP arguing to make tags hidden, have stubs excepted from tagging, or whatever their particular beef is. It was really that attitude that caused this mess in the first place.  Rich Farmbrough, 20:15, 7 December 2009 (UTC).


 * I guess I will go back to manually tagging them, took a break for a while. How do you feel about trying for something non-controversial?  Rename the category and the links, and then check once a month or so for article that no longer meet the criteria? Jeepday (talk) 22:30, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * BRFA was approved a few days ago. Will be sorted by Christmas with no obstructions. Rich Farmbrough, 02:09, 17 December 2009 (UTC).

Input helpful at Requests for comment/new users
Hi all, I have set up this RfC at Requests for comment/new users. all comments are welcome in our quest to work some solutions out. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:37, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Rename Category?
Any thoughts on renaming Category:Articles_lacking_sources_(Erik9bot) to something like Category:Articles_lacking_sources_CSQ? Similar considerations were mentioned in related conversations at the end of Erik9's last journey. Would need to rename the category and ask Rich to change all the categories on the articles. Jeepday (talk) 23:35, 16 October 2009 (UTC)