 | This page in a nutshell: Lack of sourcing in Wikipedia articles is a significant problem. We should find a consensus on what efforts we should make to provide references for all the material in Wikipedia and use technical tools to our advantage to reach this goal. |
Why references are important? References are vital for the quality and usefulness of Wikipedia articles. If you don't believe me, don't take my word for it; At the Wikimania conference 2006, Jimmy Wales himself said he believed Wikipedia should focus more on the accuracy of our existing material instead of creating new material. Since then, we have broken the 5 million article mark and there is still much room for improvement.
We tell people to not rely on Wikipedia as their sole source of information but rather use it as a starting point for further research. For this to work, articles not only need external links to guide readers to further information, but also a list of sources we used to write the Wikipedia article so the reader can go and check our material against that of the sources to check our accuracy.
In other words, we need to make a joined effort to clean up the references in Wikipedia.
With this page I hope to spur the discussion towards a proposal we can use to actively counter this problem by choosing a middle ground between the group of people who advocate deletion of unreferenced entries and those who prefer keeping them without actively working on their improvement.