On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 02:59, Fred Bauder <[email protected]> wrote: > 10 controversial Wikipedia topics: > > http://www.deseretnews.com/top/97/10-controversial-Wikipedia-topics.html >
This is really goofy. Having lots of footnotes doesn't make something controversial. It makes it well-sourced. Sometimes the reason an article is well-sourced is because it is controversial and the way to resolve controversy it to have a lot of footnotes, and sometimes it means there is one of those wonderful people who just enjoy adding lots of footnotes. Take today's FA, [[Star Trek: The Motion Picture]] has 174 footnotes. According to the criteria given by this article, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a more controversial article than Abortion or Global Warming. The stupid thing is, if you actually wanted to know how controversial an article is, there are plenty of ways to measure it: amount of vandalism, number of times it has been protected or semi-protected, how long the talk page is, how many reverts there have been, how many times admins have had to get involved to sort out 3RR violations, whether it's been the subject of mediation or ArbCom. It's all there if you click on the talk page... -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
