I just discovered an amazing Wikipedia category: Articles lacking sources from June 2006.

This article about a highly-important and well-documented event in history (the German occupation of Czechoslovakia) is not documented with citations of any kind.

Same goes for polar ice cap.

Same for relief pitcher.

Same with transcription error.



Then you have other categories, such as:

Articles lacking sources from July 2006

Articles lacking sources from August 2006

Articles lacking sources from September 2006

etc.

This would be really disgraceful for an "encyclopedia" whose Chairman Emeritus called last year for fewer articles, more sourcing. Fortunately, Wikipedia isn't really an encyclopedia. In my mind, they should simply put in a global code in MediaWiki that a new article can't be created by a user until they have added at least one source to an article lacking sources. That would cure the problem in about a month -- but then Wikipedia would have about 300,000 articles with just one (and only one) source citation.

No wonder so many editors just give up and quit. It's a rat-race of endless work.

Greg

Even better is when you do the work to source part of an article, possibly the only part you can source, and someone comes along shortly after to either delete the whole article, or delete the section you worked on, because it's insignificant information.

Word.

The problem with Wikipedians finding sources and putting them in articles, is that really what they're doing nine times out of ten is a simple Google search. The quality is basically the same as what you'll find on the rest of the internet, i.e. not always so good.

Clearly you haven't worked for any for-profit organisation whose product is written prose. You know, the ones with... "editors".

It works the same. You have to include things based on value, not on work put in. Real paid writers learn to accept a certain level of this as part of the job and use it as an aid to prioritisation.

Those writers get paid. If a writer on Wikipedia gets paid, it is a conflict of interest.

Wikipedia is an Internet site, designed to be just as good as any print encyclopedia. If Wikipedians didn't use other Internet sites because they're not all that good, what would that say about their goal?

Sorry, you misunderstood. This thread is supposed to be about complaining about the quality of the Wikipedia articles. If Wikipedia writers are allowed to compromise on quality now because they are editing for free and it would be no fun to put quality before editor enjoyment, then this thread is null and void. If so, let's swiftly U-turn the topic and we can discuss the anthropology of pro bono tertiary services in society.

There are reputable Internet sites that are quite as good as most printed sources. The problem is identifying them. Also, many of them are subscription only.

Well, many of the best sources are books and journals, and these are "subscription only". To be frank though, a shoddy web reference is better than no reference at all. As we know, by design anyone can (and does) write whatever pap they like on Wikipedia. To know that another website is saying the same thing is not completely worthless.

I have a kid (sorry, young adult, or so I am reminded) in college and that login gets me into a lot better class of source for a goodly number of areas. I figure what else am I paying tuition for anyway? Also I heard that having a library card will, in some jurisdictions, get you access to some of these paid subscription based sites as well... not sure if you can get into, for example JSTOR or LEXIS/NEXIS, but maybe that is something of interest?

Generally, if you are a resident of a city that has a large enough university, you can access JSTOR and Lexis/Nexis through the university library. If you can't for whatever reason, you can at least use the free abstracts provided online to narrow down articles, which you can then find through your public library system. Sometimes, the library will carry the journal itself, but this is becoming much less common as libraries are digitizing their collections and destroying the paper copies. If your local library does not carry the particular journal, they can usually order the specific article you want through interlibrary loan, although you sometimes have to pay photocopying charges. The articles are usually scanned at the lending library, emailed to your library, and then printed out for you.

The source, if anyone cares, is my two years employment as a library clerk at an academic library.



Actually, I have worked for two college papers, and was the editor-in-chief of one for a semester. That's obviously not the highest apex of journalism, but I do know the value of good editing. Wikipedia, however, does not make use of trained editors. Just because a Wikipedia editor cuts something out of an article doesn't mean there was a legitimate reason to cut that segment. They may have found the segment confusing, they may have a poor understanding of the topic and thus consider it "cruft", or they may want to white- or black-wash the subject of the article in question.

Also, while content is frequently cut from "real" writing, sources are often not. When I was writing my thesis I made tons of edits to the content of the paper, but I didn't cut any of my sources. Just because one doesn't cite a specific quote or statistic doesn't mean that the source was not used.

ETA: spelling & clarity

I like how some users delete print sources or mark them with nasty tags. Not esoteric books either, sometimes newspapers from the 1990's they'd probably be able to access from home using a public library card. Print sources are generally given less credence on Wikipedia than Google results.

Lar, did you know that one of the main planks of evidence against Runcorn and some others was that they all cited the Encyclopaedia Judaica and that it was allegedly very unlikely that they all had paid subscriptions? Yet the Encyclopaedia Judaica is available free to all library cardholders, certainly in some areas.



One of the main rows about lists of Jews was the credibility of the Jewish Year Book, an annual reference work that has been around for decades.

Sigh. That's the kind of thing that people start to believe when they never go to the library...

Delusional beliefs and otherwise erratic theories of mind are a rich source of lunatic social drama.