3 ms·

I agree that many articles lack sufficient reliable sources. Only college or postgrad textbooks are considered reliable sources, but not great ones, unless writ

by fluxon 13y ago

I agree that many articles lack sufficient reliable sources. Only college or postgrad textbooks are considered reliable sources, but not great ones, unless written by noted and/or frequently cited authors. In my opinion, experts should be sincerely welcomed to kibbitz on talk pages - not directly in editing articles - with a strong invitation to cite sources other than themselves. This approach, optimistically, will keep bias on the Talk page, and out of articles, and give experts a substantial real and perceived voice, currently lacking.

hyperpape 13y ago
Yeah, but the talk pages are basically just sewers for a lot of articles. I look at a talk page and my thought is "god, no one will ever read what I write here".
- fluxon 13y ago
  It takes a cool head to continue sometimes when discussions head toward the sewer. But we strive to stay exactly so cool, and lots of us even take a bit of guidance from Paul Graham's "How to Disagree" http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html and the pyramid diagram based on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Di...
  - hyperpape 13y ago
    Oh, that's another association for sewer that I wasn't thinking of. I didn't actually mean that the comments are crap or nasty, though they sometimes are. I just meant that it's a big backlog of comments that people would probably not read through.
- alc1 13y ago
  What you can do is first start a section on the talk page about the topic and which sentences/sections could be changed. Then go ahead and make the intended edit on the article and then link to the section on the talk page in your edit comment. Then any editor who may potentially revert or have an issue with the edit will see that link and can go directly to that talk section that you started. The markup used for the linking in the edit comment is the same as the wikitext markup. For example, an edit comment like this: ... see talk page for discussion. would be marked up: ... [[Talk:Article name#Section heading|see talk page]] for discussion. This might help start discussions about low-traffic article topics that would otherwise languish at the bottom of the talk page for weeks if not months.

by fluxon 13y ago

hyperpape 13y ago

Yeah, but the talk pages are basically just sewers for a lot of articles. I look at a talk page and my thought is "god, no one will ever read what I write here".

fluxon 13y ago
It takes a cool head to continue sometimes when discussions head toward the sewer. But we strive to stay exactly so cool, and lots of us even take a bit of guidance from Paul Graham's "How to Disagree" http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html and the pyramid diagram based on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Di...
- hyperpape 13y ago
  Oh, that's another association for sewer that I wasn't thinking of. I didn't actually mean that the comments are crap or nasty, though they sometimes are. I just meant that it's a big backlog of comments that people would probably not read through.
alc1 13y ago
What you can do is first start a section on the talk page about the topic and which sentences/sections could be changed. Then go ahead and make the intended edit on the article and then link to the section on the talk page in your edit comment. Then any editor who may potentially revert or have an issue with the edit will see that link and can go directly to that talk section that you started. The markup used for the linking in the edit comment is the same as the wikitext markup. For example, an edit comment like this: ... see talk page for discussion. would be marked up: ... [[Talk:Article name#Section heading|see talk page]] for discussion. This might help start discussions about low-traffic article topics that would otherwise languish at the bottom of the talk page for weeks if not months.