Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-03-27/Essay


 * Extra cites can also be housed in the talk page, where they may prove useful in the future should cites in the article become unverifiable, AfD notability, or other reasons. -- Green  C  00:23, 28 March 2022 (UTC)


 * I mildly disagree with the section about over-tagging. I happen to edit LOTS of under-edited articles and quite often I see sections with many footnotes, but over time people added some texts in-between, and it is very hard to recognize which statements do require extra verification. Of course, if most of the section is unreferenced, then the section-wide hatnote is reasonable, but when there are plenty of references, the questionable statements IMHO deserve direct indication. So instead of removing "cn" tags, I would recommend to invent a less intrusive text of the tag.Loew Galitz (talk) 02:29, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
 * I disagree also. "Frank Ito invented the caps lock key" may not be counter-intuitive or controversial but it's still wrong. Verifiability requires that we be able to point to where we got a particular fact from.  I know some editors prefer just deleting uncited text rather than adding tags, and it's not a bad idea. Often it is easier to completely rewrite an unreferenced article than to provide references for.  Hawkeye7   (discuss)  05:09, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
 * It's a worthy attempt, but much has changed since 2007. A simple riposte is that any statement may be challenged at any time, and eventually everything will be. The idea that you go through GA with uncited statements that get challenged later – during the DYK process, perhaps, hmm? ... or even waiting to get a really thorough pasting at FAC, is anyone seriously advising that? – is I'm afraid at least 15 years behind the times. More to the point, it invites fly-by editing and the addition of unverified, and often frankly unverifiable claims, in other words WP:OR. It anything is a wrong direction, that'd be it. No, the encyclopedia is built, brick by brick, of established, verifiable statements. But actually, the "sky is blue" title is deceptively misleading. If we are writing an article about atmospheric physics, we might well have a whole section cited to many scholarly sources explaining exactly why the sky is blue, it is a deep and quite challenging question to explain to non-physicists. In an article on flower-arranging, we will not state "and the sky is blue", we will perhaps say "Against a plain backdrop like a blue sky, ..." and the claim about the way the arrangement looks will be cited, while the blueness of the sky will then certainly pass review without a citation of its own. So, the article is, I suggest, conflating two quite different things: specific claims (citation required) and passing mentions inside cited statements (no specific citation needed). Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:17, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
 * About the WP:Good article thing: the person who reviews a nomination assumes the responsibility of ensuring that the article meets the WP:Good article criteria, one of which (2c) is that it contains no original research, before passing. This means assuming the responsibility of ensuring that any uncited statements do not represent WP:Original research. With that in mind, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that all content be cited in an article that is nominated for WP:Good article status. TompaDompa (talk) 15:59, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
 * The following is factually incorrect: "In fact, the Good Article criteria merely state that inline citations are required for 'direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons'". The relevant GA criterion (2b) actually states that, for a GA, "all inline citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons". These are very different statements: "inline citations are required for..." versus "inline citations are from...". Based on WP:VERIFY (which GA criteria 2 start from), it's entirely reasonable for a GA reviewer to require a citation for everything that's asserted in an article, beyond the self-evident. EddieHugh (talk) 14:05, 3 April 2022 (UTC)