Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-31/Opinion essay
The monster under the rug
Sven Manguard has been editing Wikipedia for just over a year. He works primarily in the File namespace, but also participates in backlog eliminations and other
The views expressed are those of the author only. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.
Whatever people may say about declining participation, Wikipedia still generates a lot of new content. We add articles and upload dozens upon dozens of files every day, and that is unquestionably a good thing. However, as a community, we tend to neglect a large variety of problems that have cropped up in older articles. We sweep them under the rug, so to speak, and that is unquestionably a very bad thing.
The fact of the matter is that Wikipedia has swept so many problems under the rug that we now have a monster on our hands. We have backlogs that are in the hundreds, in the thousands, and in a few cases, in the hundreds of thousands, that have sat relatively untackled for months or years. These aren't petty issues either. There are 250,000 articles that need references. By that, I don’t mean that they need more references, I mean that there are, at last count, a quarter million articles that do not have a single citation to support them, and those are just the articles that are tagged as such. Some of these completely unreferenced articles were tagged as far back as October 2006, a half decade ago. There are an additional 250,000 articles that need additional references, and over 200,000 with unsourced statements. Less absurdly high in count but just as important, there are almost 10,000 articles tagged as containing original research, over 8,500 with disputed neutrality, and over 5,500 with disputed accuracy. I am cherry picking especially important issues with especially high numbers, yes, but there are about two dozen other content related backlogs with over a thousand items in them — listed at the Wikipedia Contribution Team’s backlog dashboard — that are not listed here.
What am I trying to say by listing all of these massive backlogs? I am saying that we, as a community, are failing our readers. People come to Wikipedia, for the most part, expecting accurate, neutral, well written articles. In almost a million cases, we cannot with a straight face vouch for the accuracy of the articles we're presenting. It is depressing, it is unacceptable, and unless the community, or significant portions of it, works to tackle these backlogs, the problem will only get worse.
There are a number of factors to blame for this problem. There was a time when ignorance of the problem was a valid claim, but considering the amount of times that one backlog or another has been mentioned in a prominent location, I no longer believe ignorance is a passable excuse. Instead, I believe it comes down to our culture. Working in backlogs certainly isn't glamorous, but more importantly, I don't perceive it as being looked upon by the community as being especially commendable or even as being especially valuable. It seems rather rare that a candidate for RfA puts forth their nomination by leading off their credentials with something like "I have spent the last six months clearing out the backlog at Category:Articles that need to differentiate between fact and fiction" (a category with over 3,500 items, by the way). Even worse, I can point to a few cases where someone did put forth backlog work as a credential, only to have it implicitly or explicitly disregarded by people who only seemed to focus on whether the nominee had written "enough" articles or had "enough" good and featured articles. Simply put, until the community decides that working on backlogs is a valuable activity, and shows it not only at RfA, but also in discussions and everyday community interaction, not enough people are going to jump in and start working on clearing backlogs.
This is not to say that no one values backlog work. There are a few groups of editors dedicated to working on clearing out particularly important backlogs. The Guild of Copy Editors and WikiProject Wikify deserve a tremendous amount of respect in particular for keeping the backlogs at Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit and Category:Articles that need to be wikified low; by doing so they ensure a great many articles are a great deal more readable than they otherwise would have been. In the area of files, which happens to be where I spend a majority of my time, backlogs are kept low by a combination of exceedingly useful bots, a few organized drives (such as WikiProject Images and Media's recently concluded Move to Commons drive), and a small handful of editors who devote large amounts of time to working with files.
It is, of course, not enough. This brings me to the primary motivation behind my decision to write this opinion piece:
I am asking, no, begging, everyone that reads this piece to go to this page, select a backlog that they think they can help out with, and knock off a few items. Spend an hour on it, devote ten minutes to backlogs once or twice a week, or do whatever else works for you. It doesn't have to take up a lot of time. If you want, show me a few diffs and I'll give you a barnstar; I'd be happy to. If 1,000 people read this, and each of them clears ten items this month, that’s 10,000 items. If everyone does ten items a month for an entire year, 120,000 items will have been cleared. Even distributed among two dozen or more backlogs, that is a formidable number.
I wouldn't go as far as to beg random strangers to do this if I weren't absolutely convinced that this was of vital importance, but here I am begging for all to see. I also wouldn't ask this of the community if I didn't think it were possible to make a noticeable difference. Recently I cleared a 1,500 item backlog in just a month, with the assistance of one other editor. The two of us, in weeks, took out a backlog that had sat untouched for years, and that specific backlog will never come back. While we'll never be able to eliminate maintenance tasks, it is possible to eliminate the massive backlogs that we have now, and return the number of pending cleanup tasks to a reasonable, functional, level. All it takes is work — and editors willing to do that work. Please join me in the coming months. Together we can defeat the monster under the rug.
Discuss this story
Hello there everyone. This essay was actually ready for print last week, however another editor had a piece waiting, which was in front of this in line. I didn't know that it would happen, but a few days after I wrote this essay, the Signpost put out a call for writers, which I responed to by volunteering to write the Discussion report, as well as coordinating the Opinion Desk. It was a complete accident that the first piece being published under my tenure is one that I wrote myself. While it certainly was enjoyable to write this, I won't be writing any more of them for a while, I only have so many interesting opinions, and I've got to save them up.
That means it's time for more shameless begging! If you have a Wikipedia related opinion, are capable of composing it coherently and in your own words, and are willing to share it with everyone else, I want to hear from you. Really, those are pretty much the only requirements that the Signpost has for opinion essays. It's not like they're flowing in so fast that we have to pick and choose; if you bring in a quality submission, the chances that it'll get run are exceedingly high.
I'm also not above going out and finding people who have already written essays on Wikipedia and asking them to run those essays on the Signpost. If I do ask you, please consider it an honor (and say yes).
The opinion section, more than any other area of the Signpost, can't work without members of the community becoming involved. I hope to hear from some of you soon,
This discussion hasn't really made it to the wikis yet, but at the Foundation, some of us are trying to start a movement towards documenting and re-examining how Wikipedia handles workflows. Firstly, the Foundation employees are hired for skill and availability, so they are rarely wiki-insiders, and often unaware of how complicated some of the processes are. Secondly, once you document these workflows, certain weaknesses in them become apparent.
It seems that this pattern comes up over and over again; where things are seriously broken, it's because there's no system to channel resources appropriately. So you need to make appeals for heroic behavior. This is unsustainable.
The wiki model is great when, in one person, you can combine a lot of roles: noticing a problem, doing research, scheduling a time to do the work, and the requisite technical skill. All that comes into play, even if you're just fixing a typo. But when the problems are larger and more difficult, it starts to make sense for there to be different roles and stages to the work, and maybe even different incentives.
A site of our size should not be frightened of a queue of work that is several thousand items long. We just have to figure out how to activate our readers' interest. What do you think?
NeilK (talk) 16:53, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think what it all comes down to is that we are all volunteers here, so we want to be spending our time working on things that will be noticed (like articles). The backgrounds stuff, like backlogs, are things that are rarely noticed and the only obvious benefit is a larger edit count (which does inspire some people to do it).
If you ever want the backlogs to be something that is heavily focused on, you need to have some sort of system that recognizes the work that people do in them. The more "praise-worthy" it is made in terms of rewards, the more people that will want to do it. And, hopefully, the higher in regard it will be held in places like RfA, though we all know RfA is thoroughly broken as it is anyways, so I kinda doubt that one. SilverserenC 17:37, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- All the more reason to give Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb a shot, yes?
Wha? 18:21, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply ]
- I've worked on backlogs before. I've cleared out the backlog SandyGeorgia links to below several times. I just have a project and a test this week, so i'm a little busy. Ask me this weekend, I should be free then. SilverserenC 18:33, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I tried, in spite of my limited time, and I gave up because trying to clean out one measly category correctly could take me an entire week: my conclusion is reinforcement of the concern that as Wikipedia has become more known and has attempted to recruit to account for declining editorship, incompetent editors are replacing competent editors in droves. The notion that knowledgeable editors can address these problems is naive (just imagine trying to remove the POV from Chavez-- I've been working on that for six years).So, I took what looked like a relatively easy category, less than 50 pages, that I thought I should have been able to empty Category:Pages with missing references list-- what I found was massive problems in every article I looked at, such that simply adding a reflist to the article would be irresponsible (and why can't a bot do that, anyway?). Perhaps I should lower my standards and just add the darn reflist parameter, but I'm not going to do that and then have someone come along and say, "look at that, she added the tag and didn't even notice the article was a copyvio". I found most typically Indian editors adding most likely copyvios and indecipherable text, I found text so utterly indecipherable that it would take me hours of research to figure out how to fix any one article, I found incorrect article names, dubious notability, you name it.
The problem is not that estblished editors are failing-- the problem is that there is simply too much crud coming in from incompetent editors for established editors to have a prayer of keeping up with the routine maintenance. In almost every case, I came to the conclusion that no text would be better than the bad text there: I don't know why we're actively recruiting editors who don't display competence or commitment to Wikipedia via university projects.
It's a nice editorial, but we can't get there from here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:45, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I have long advocated that Wikipedia needs to shed a few thousand articles, however while my view has little support. Meanwhile, users are able to mass create stubs with bots. I appreciate the ideal that we should strive to cover everything, but I also believe that we should prioritize on doing it right, rather than having something on everything now. All of this, however, is slightly off topic. We have the problems sitting around now, we really should try to fix them. For the sake of discussion, however, if articles really are beyond saving, deleting articles tagged with issues does lower the backlogs on those issues.
Wha? 18:13, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply ]
I know of a few thousand articles related to motorcycling topics that have been taggeed for years as being unsourced or original research and whatnot. But I also know that these articles, with only a handful of exceptions, get next to no traffic. It makes plenty of sense if you think about it: the reason the monster gets ignored is that nobody ever sees the monster. Because there are a million or so articles on Wikipedia which are so obscure that their maintenance tags are being seen by next to nobody, so next to nobody reacts to the maintenance tags.There is a backlog of articles that get a significant amount of traffic which need to be cleaned up, but that backlog is a couple orders of magnitude smaller. So I disagree that Wikipedia is really failing its readers here -- in 99% of these cases there are no readers to fail. As a suggestion, I would want this backlog list sorted by traffic, so that the articles with the most readers are fixed first, and the ones with no readers are fixed last, or never. It would be a terrible waste of limited resources to work on the majority of these articles. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:07, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Now the only reason I was viewing them is totally meta -- I was poking around at random on Wikipedia:WikiProject Motorcycling/Cleanup listing for important articles needing cleanup. But that was before Wikipedia:WikiProject Motorcycling/Popular pages became available; now I focus my efforts on what matters and lose no sleep at all over the bad pages with no readers.
If these neglected, unread pages bother you personally, that's fine. But you need a better argument if you're telling me to quit working on a page with thousands of hits per month because some page with 200 hits a month is unsourced. If anything, it would be beneficial to discourage editors from wasting time on pages like that.
But we do agree that the highest traffic pages should be fixed first, so by all means, push ahead on that front. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 18:40, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
So what if they have been tagged for ten years? Many of them would take ten years to get as many hits as an important article gets in a week.
If you know how to find editors who share your peeve here, that these trees that fall in the forest that nobody hears are a "problem", and if (for some odd reason) these editors would not otherwise contribute, great. At least they're contributing something. But if you want to pull them away from fixing high traffic, or even moderate traffic, articles to fix these pages because they simply bug you, then that harms Wikipedia. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 03:22, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
To comment on the Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb, There is already a Wikicup, it ended today. 124 people signed up for 2011, and many more of us are likely to sign up for 2012, I know I will. It's purpose is mainly getting featured material. Maybe we should argue that there should be some lesser reward for getting maintenance tags removed. If it'd get passed, I'd not only take the challenge, but I'd have a chance of making it past round 1! Everybody wins! hewhoamareismyself 23:13, 1 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Also, nobody is "panicking" and I for one resent that implication as well. We're addressing a veritable problem and thinking of possible solutions.
It's good that you're taking the time and investing the effort to go for GA, but many "articles" don't even resemble an actual article yet (think TV episodes) and many editors are simply not able to or interested in that level of work. Getting some of them to help make those articles meet the bare minimum requirements of our core content policies would be a gigantic step forward. --213.196.210.71 (talk) 13:01, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Working on success
The unreference BLP issue evenually got going after a date was established after which certain things where no longer allowed, it eventually was a massive sucess clearing over 60,000 unrefenced BLPs. I do think this can be extended on other new article content and there would be agreement to work forward on clearing backlogs in this fashion. Regards,
Citation needed
Editors creating, especially mass-creating completely unreferenced placeholder "articles" in mainspace should simply be banned in droves. That would be one very efficient way to create an incentive for people to write properly, or not at all. --195.14.206.143 (talk) 00:30, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I am an ordinary untrained Wikipedia user and editor. Occasionally I have been persuaded to become involved in a more systematic way - and it has never come to anything. This issue of backlogs is a good example. I expect my experience is fairly typical (whereas my admitting it is unusual and foolish). Here goes:
I decide "ok, let's see if I can help here". The first link in the essay is 250,000 articles that need additional references. Right, that sounds promising, maybe I can help. I follow the link, and find a further link Category:Unreferenced Genetics articles, a field I may be able to help with. Then a further link Talk:Dominance (genetics) - I understand dominance, I ought to be able to help. I find myself at the talk page, which does not obviously complain about lack of references, though I do not read every sentence there. Instead, I visit the article itself, and go to the reference list. It has plenty of references. WTF? I came here to deal with a lack of references, and it has plenty. Ah well, I have more constructive uses for my time. Maproom (talk) 13:21, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I used to do occasional work with the 'articles needing help' - then the system was changed to produced the looping around set-up described above ... and I am sure there are far more than 25 history pages requiring cleanup. As for references: not all articles need them directly - for example those developing particular aspects of a main topic - thus
A suggestion I have made in the past - with the 'left hand column links' have an entry 'Random page needing clean-up' (which picks up on articles with any of the relevant tags). (I know the answer will probably be along the lines of 'involves far more work than seems obvious to the person suggesting it.') Jackiespeel (talk) 15:39, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Uncited medical statements should be treated like BLPs
My controversial proposal has for a long time been 'delete all unrefereced articles immediately'. I get lots of moral support for that one, but the prospect of actually getting community consensus for it is slim. OK, so how about this for a lesser starting place? Uncited BLPs were treated differently than other uncited articles because of their potential for harm to living persons. Let's do the same for medical statements. Uncited medical statements can cause as much harm as uncited BLPs-- let's shoot uncited medical articles on site, and empower editors to delete uncited medical statements anywhere as easily as they can uncited BLPs. At least it's a start; in the medical realm, no info is better than bad or dangerous info, and citing medical statements correctly requires knowledge of and access to higher quality sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:58, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a more typical mess (C-class), with all kinds of citations that are misleading or misused, and uncited statements: Medical cannabis. It would serve our readers better if it were one-third the size, and cleaning out the garbage would make it easier for experienced editors to source it correctly. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:06, 4 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The negativity
I'm seeing a fair number of negative (though realistic) comments above. One backlog that looks relatively easy to tackle is Category:Persondata templates without short description parameter. It is very large, but for most articles, it requires only reading the first paragraph and compressing it to a few words (while also checking the other persondata fields). Chris857 (talk) 02:31, 3 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
An idea: tie it to WikiProjects
Specifically on the {{unreferenced}} backlog, I'm wondering if there would be any merit in having WikiProject-based unreferenced backlog categories. I'm not that interested in going through and finding references for articles on topics I'm not that interested in to start with, plus I'm not very good at it. But on specific topics like philosophy, I've got access to books, databases, libraries etc.
Anyone want to make a bot that goes through the references-based backlogs and adds them to categories based on their WikiProjects? I had a crack at doing it with CatScan, but it took so long that my university network's TTL kicked in and stopped the connection.
Surely, WikiProjects could take some collective responsibility here? Instead of crowing about how many GAs and FAs they've got, crow about how they've got a really small unreferenced backlog. Might work. —Tom Morris (talk) 12:30, 3 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I've found a way of doing it using the article lists tool on Toolserver: here is the page for Philosophy. There's 831 articles there. That's far more manageable for me to start plugging away at than 250,000! Heh. —Tom Morris (talk) 13:33, 3 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
criticism
Only a few weeks ago we finally saw the uBLP backlog cleared after an 18 month focus on it, I think the essay should have acknowledged that a little more strongly. The downside of focussing on some backlogs is that others may sit for longer, if we'd chosen to focus on the oldest tagged articles or the oldest unreferenced articles then those backlogs would have seen progress - instead we as a community had a focus on the uBLP backlog and I suspect some others grew whilst that was resolved. Providing we choose wisely there is some logic in focussing on a particular backlog. But if you do that you need to be robust about accepting backlogs elsewhere - of course whilst we were focussing on the unreferenced BLP backlog others were welcome to work on the other backlogs. But the prioritisation of particular backlogs means the deprioritisation of others, which is why in my view if we choose another backlog to prioritise it needs to be the backlog we anticipate having the highest proportion of troublesome articles.
My favourite two are death anomalies and negative BLP statements as I think they are high risk, and consequently I spend some of my time there. I also spend a lot of time fixing typos because that's what I happen to enjoy, but I'm not proposing that we treat that as a priority. However I'm very much aware that we've made huge progress on the death anomalies in the last year or so, and on at least one quality measure things have greatly improved as typos are much harder to find than when I started out. None of those three involve templates, and in my view part of our problem is that a few years ago we shifted from fixing problems to templating them for hypothetical others to fix. I'm not convinced that the growth of templating was that positive a thing, and if there was one easy way to reduce backlogs I'd suggest it would be to reduce or automate some of the templating and detemplating and try and persuade some of our templaters to improve articles instead.
One aspect of the essay that I would strongly dispute is the effect of backlog cleanup at RFA. I've nominated half a dozen successful candidates in the last year or so, and spoken to many others who were considering running. I'm rarely a defender of the RFA process and normally one of the first to consider it broken, but in its respect for people who've cleared backlogs I think RFA has functioned well. I'm aware of a number of candidates who went to RFA during the uBLP cleanup with experience that included clearing uBLP backlogs for a particular wikiproject. Far from RFA not valuing such backlog work I don't remember any such candidate failing. Now that was a backlog where one had to hone two key skills, reliable sourcing and knowing when you couldn't save an article and had to prod or AFD it instead; I'm not convinced the community would be so supportive of someone who had cleared x hundred articles from our "needs an image" backlog - they'd probably need to demonstrate other skills/achievements as well.. But in my conversations with people who'd just failed an RFA I often encouraged them to pick a wikiproject that interested them and resolve their uBLP backlog; Some who took my advice have run again and are now admins. To me that was for some people the sort of task that separated those who just needed the right sort of experience from those who needed the right aptitude or motivation.
Another issue is that the essay needs the context that standards have risen as has average quality, many articles that were considered perfectly OK when written have now joined the backlogs as we seem inexorably to be drifting from a policy of verifiable to a policy of verified. Raising standards means that backlogs are pretty much guaranteed as each increase in standards means a proportion of our 3.78 million articles immediately drops from meeting the old standard to not meeting the new one. That isn't an argument against further raising standards let alone a call for us to lower our standards back to earlier levels, just a practical point that explains much of the backlog
So whilst I don't agree with everything in the essay I'd like to thank Sven for writing it and for bringing the backlogs issue to the fore. In terms of next steps I would suggest that it is helpful to have a community focus, but lets do it without the negatives that were associated with the uBLP project. If the community is going to focus on a backlog we need the choice of backlog to be a community decision, we need to be to be robust in defending that focus against those who want to shift the focus back onto their own pet priorities, and we need to avoid contentious ultimatums - a carrot based process not a stick one. There was a suggestion earlier on that we focus on high traffic articles, I can see much merit in that, but would counter that if anything those are probably less likely to contain headline grabbers than either death anomalies or negative BLP statements. Wouldn't it be great if by the middle of 2012 we could confidently say that every mafiosi, pornstar or prostitute we have written about is either long dead, clearly a fictional character or reliably sourced. Currently there are loads where the article itself isn't a uBLP but it contains such information. ϢereSpielChequers 17:02, 4 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Additional discussion
Thanks for this opinion piece. There has been some additional discussion on the wiki-en-l mailing list, best seen by starting here (there may be related discussion in the original thread as well). The points raised there (so far) appear to be:
- Mis-tagging or over-zealous tagging can occur (this makes the size of backlog misleading)
- Tags are not always removed by the person fixing the problems (see OTRS point in particular)
- It has been suggested that readers be invited to remove the tags if they see no problems
- It was also suggested that those adding the tags should check back at some later point
It seems there is a bit of a disconnect between those who think tagging is something that is a useful way to create workflows for others to deal with problems, and those who think that people should (eventually) fix the problems they find, or at least help manage the backlogs. With that in mind, does anyone know how much tagging is or has been done 'by rote', or even using bots? If the pace of tagging has always exceeded the pace of cleaning up, that would be one reason why the backlogs are so large. It might not just be because the cleaning up is slow, but it might also be because the tagging is much faster. It might also be an idea to do random sampling to see how accurate the tagging is. Certainly, tags that are years old might be outdated if standards have risen/changed in the interim period. So there is a case to be made for tags that are years old being themselves tagged as needing at least checking by those who do tagging, even if those doing such checking don't feel able to fix the problems identified.About prioritising, it is essential to do the right stuff on a page first. There is no point wikifying, dealing with dead external links, categories, orphan pages, etc, without some attention being paid first to issues such as notability and copyvio. The priority should be to get articles on a solid footing and foundation before dealing with the other stuff. This is also why I'm reluctant to help out with wikignoming activities such as wiki-linking. I'm prepared to do this for articles that have been vetted and passed to a minimum standard, but I don't want to do such work if the article may be deleted as a copyvio or non-notable. So if the backlogs could be sliced and diced in that way (i.e. put everything through the basic checks first, and then pass them to the other queues), it would help immensely. Carcharoth (talk) 03:31, 5 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Overtagging is not a significant problem. Any article with a tag that shouldn't be there is overwhelmingly outnumbered by articles that don't currently have tags but should realistically have several. DreamGuy (talk) 15:13, 5 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Does anyone here think there is merit in the idea of modifying the tagging templates to make clearer to readers and editors that they can remove the tags if they think the problems are fixed? It would be something along the lines of HotCat, where a single click would remove the template. Or put a message on the talk page asking someone to look at the article and update the tag. Something like that would harness a lot more eyes to see if the tagging is actually accurate. Carcharoth (talk) 17:41, 5 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
On allegedly failing our readers
There was a comment in the essay something like (not hunting for the exact wording) that we have million articles we cannot guarantee the accuracy of an that we are therefore failing our readers. The other way to look at it is that we have a million articles that we have warned our readers to be suspicious of the accuracy of and on those million we are *not* failing our readers because we gave them an explicit warning about something that is implicit on all of our content. This whole site is made up of articles contributed by people off the street. Just because an article contains references it doesn't mean that it's accurate, free of bias, etc. We are never going to be perfect, and by not being perfect we are not failing our readers. If we were an encyclopedia with paid editors and contributors and charged people to buy it and had untrustworthy articles *then* we would be failing our readers. We don't owe our readers any more than what they can expect from a website that almost anyone at all is allowed to edit without first passing any test of intelligence, writing ability and objectivity.
Wikipedia has competing values: openness and quality, to name the big ones, are almost diametrically opposed. Allowing anyone to edit is great when you have no content and need to bring more people in, but it's bad when you already have content and don't want it to get worse. About the only thing preventing an unstoppable downward spiral is that thankfully the people who are less skilled in writing an article with any value are also less skilled at figuring out *how* to edit articles. With such a massive dump of largely worthless content on some of the lesser travelled pages, and with the site making it extremely difficult to not only delete articles but making them stay deleted, if we have volunteers taking their valuable time going around tagging content as low quality, then they should be praised. Demanding that they then go and clean up all that content, despite the fact that there are no processes to ensure that anything fixed will ever *stay* fixed, is asking quite a bit.
If a parent saw someone else picking up a candy wrapper that their thoughtless child dropped on the ground and then berated that stranger for not coming onto the lawn, picking up all the broken toys, arranging them in the garage, washing the car and planting a flower garden, we would think that mother or father was crazy. Instead of complaining about the backlog maybe we should focus on what causes the problem in the first place and thank the people who do anything at all to improve things when the system is so hostile to taking steps toward ensuring real quality. DreamGuy (talk) 15:06, 5 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Citations are so complicated, they baffle the experienced
It's a poor wiki-workman who blames his/her/its tools, I know, but the editing interface is a friggin' nightmare when it comes to references; I've been editing since 2004 and I can't figure them out half the time. No wonder so many articles are poorly referenced - it's like real work. (I suspect this is part of the reason participation has dropped; a newbie excitedly clicks on the "edit" button for an article and stares at a screen of apparent gobbledybook that overwhelms the actual words, then flees in terror.)
I believe this is being worked on, and not a moment too soon. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 14:35, 7 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sort of apologies
Dear folks, I want to say sorry for not putting proper sources for most of the articles I create and edit. It's my Achilles heel, I know it. Be sure that I always try to add relevant, true facts to the articles. In other words, I'm giving healthy food to this huge monster.
But I must explain why I do that. First of all, sometimes I feel it unnecessary to write them for each fact. Do I have to quote each time I write "this racecar driver won this championship"? I try to do moderately long articles (3-6 kB for drivers). Adding sources for each little fact takes even more time, whereas I usually put a couple of links to websites that have the little facts in subpages.
I prefer to spend my time trying to clear long lists like this one over others. It's a different way to contribute to Wikipedia. Is it fine with you? --NaBUru38 (talk) 01:13, 28 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I wish we had a way to cite ourselves
I know Wikipedia articles are generally a bad source. But (in keeping with summary style) I think a fair number of these unsourced articles summarize material from other articles they link to. Because the editors have just seen the citations at the articles they link, they don't feel the need to re-cite them in the new spot. This is especially true since when done properly, re-citing all the references can end up leading to a summary that seems overwhelmed by the number of inline citations it has inherited from a longer piece of text. I wish that there were a way that we could highlight/mark a Wikilink to serve also as a reference, only in the limited circumstance where the linked article is being summarized in brief. At least for purposes of taking articles off the backlog list. Wnt (talk) 04:04, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Why I think there is this problem
Laziness. In my opinion, what happens is that people think "Why spend the energy fixing [whatever it is] when I can just add a tag ans someone else can fix it.":Jay8gWPIM 01:23, 26 December 2011 (UTC)[reply ]