Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-07-01/Blog

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Here's to the Texans! TomStar81 (Talk) 03:43, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

• Great stuff, & good to see a piece that goes into detail on the process of article writing. Johnbod (talk) 12:27, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
• Re:

  Their plan of attack included scrapping the entire existing article, all 5,243 words of it, and starting anew. This allowed them to not worry about where existing content had come from and instead concentrate on including facts and views from the principal sources on the topic

  I'm really curious how prominent this practice is for most serial FA contributors. (I.e., I'd love to see a Signpost piece on it.) I know I do it myself. How else can you stand by an article's quality without personally verifying every citation? And you might as well start from scratch with all of the rephrasing and citation reformatting. Also would like to echo Johnbod—great topic, great piece – czar 20:25, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Agree that the best way to take an old article up to FA, is to essentially gut it. At least gut the existing sourcing, and whatever prose you keep, make sure you have your own verification sourcing to back it up. I just failed a GAN that was a classic example, an article that was begun in 2001. Looked fairly decent until I noticed the first copyvio. One examination led to another, and it was like pulling a loose thread on a sweater.— Maile (talk) 23:54, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

I agree. To try to track down sources for all of the information in the article would be incredibly time-consuming. It's much easier to do the research, which you'd have to do in any case, and write from scratch. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 07:38, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

• One point this blog makes that needs to be kept in mind is that contributing to Wikipedia currently requires doing research. Serious research. In my own experience, it can take someone between 6 months & 2 years to learn enough about a subject to improve the articles about it; improving an article so that its content is usable -- bringing it to roughly C or B class -- requires effort equivalent to writing an undergraduate term paper. (And as this blog notes, writing a FA class article requires even more effort & research.) While in the early days anyone could edit, that was because Wikipedia's coverage was so spotty & shallow; now that Wikipedia is far more comprehensive & detailed in its coverage, not everyone can edit. And no amount of fancy new software or improved contributor behavior is going to allow more people to edit Wikipedia. -- llywrch (talk) 02:20, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

  Not convinced. Yesterday I found the following four people who have been covered by the ANB since April have no article.

  1. Josephine Casey (1 January 1878?-27 January 1950), labour organizer and leader, women's rights advocate
  2. Emily Borie Hartshorne Mudd (6 September 1898-2 May 1998), sexual and marital counsellor, birth control advocate
  3. Elias Neau (1662-7 September 1722), religious educator
  4. Joy R. Simonson (16 January 1919-24 June 2007), women's rights advocate, federal government official

  The situation is much better (or worse - if you are looking for uncreated articles) than in October 2010, though I don't have the figures to hand.

  All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:11, 7 July 2015 (UTC).
  

Note; I am putting stubs in, please do contribute to the articles even though the links are turning blue! All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:23, 7 July 2015 (UTC).

Maybe we need better ways to steer editors towards missing articles. Gamaliel (talk) 18:16, 7 July 2015 (UTC)

My point wasn't that it wasn't hard to find articles in need of creating; I've created two new ones over the last month. My point was that a potential contributor might be tempted to add to or improve on an existing article, discover just how much research is required in order to do that (not all potential contributors will just happen to have a proper reliable source at hand), & be discouraged from even making a first edit. For example, through personal experience I've come to learn an awful lot about adoption & being a foster parent, but due to the lack of reliable sources I know better than to try to add anything to the relevant articles. Unless I take the time to do the research to find reliable sources, which may take 6 to 36 months -- which is the result of making Wikipedia more comprehensive & more reliable. -- llywrch (talk) 07:22, 8 July 2015 (UTC)