Wikipedia talk:Analysis of citation issues for date and year articles

Referencing policy

WP:DOYCITE specifically does not exempt these articles and they are all subject to WP:V. This is a guideline change from approx. 4 years ago. Elizium23 (talk) 07:31, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

In the English Wikipedia, verifiability means other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source. It is reasonable for me to query Ann X. Ample's quoted birth date of 1987 and remove the claim unless someone adds a citation. It's not reasonable for me to question every uncited fact in the encyclopedia and threaten to remove them all unless the community downs tools to add references everywhere by next week. Where do we draw the line in between? Is requiring citations for half a million claims reasonable? Many proofs are already one click away at the linked article which begins Jo Schmo (born 1 January 1970)^[1] is a.... On the other hand, we should be removing the birthday of someone who played tiddlywinks once for Elbonia, and the release date of the third bug fix to Sportsball 2017 (cited or not), and this exercise may help with that process. Certes (talk) 11:08, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I am getting deep into this now, and it seems to me like the sheer number of citation checking needed to bring any of these articles into compliance with referencing guidelines would be unbelievably onerous. I am not sure what a solution would look like -- even with a very streamlined workflow, the need to have a human supervise the process would probably limit someone to a couple verifications per minute tops. Assuming around a dozen people all set aside one hour a week, it might be conceivable to bang out one date article per day, but keeping it up for an entire year would be difficult. Overall, it seems like a massive orchestration of effort which accomplishes basically nothing. jp×g 12:40, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Year articles

We have individual articles for all years 516 BC to 2029 inclusive and a few others back to about 817 BC (plus the exceptional 15,000 BC in art). Certes (talk) 11:22, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

I changed the decade articles from 490s BC to 990s to transclude births and deaths from year articles, moving entries from decade to year where appropriate. Some decades after 1000 had so many entries in the year articles that I felt they should continue to be filtered manually, but another editor has extended the transclusion to some decades up to 1350s. Previous discussion: WP Years. Certes (talk) 12:06, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

@Certes: Oh, that's interesting! I was extending them up to 1390s just a few minutes ago and wondering why nobody had bothered to do so previously. I guess that's just because the last person got bored (surely someone will come along later, in my wake, and wonder why they stop at 1390s). jp×g 12:32, 21 January 2021 (UTC)