User:Carbon Caryatid/RefDeskSorry

This is a page to draft a response template for the RefDesks. Any of the regular editors there is especially welcome to join in.

UPDATE: The agreed text is now at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk/Sorry template.

UPDATE: A proper template has been created, and can be invoked by typing {{refdesk-sorry}}

Wording

"Thank you for your question! Wikipedia celebrates curiosity. We are sorry that you haven't received a reply, but these reference desks are staffed by volunteers. Apparently, none of our current staff feel they have the expertise or knowledge to answer your question.

You may find answers elsewhere. One excellent resource is a real-life reference desk, staffed by professional librarians. There may be one in your area, often at a central branch of a public library system. In addition, your national library (e.g. the British Library) may allow online reference requests. An alternative is the New York Public Library's ASK service, which operates by text-chat and telephone. Here's a news article explaining how they work, which describes them as a "human Google".

Please feel free to ask us another question in the future, or indeed to re-post your original question (perhaps re-wording it) after a week or so, as there may be a different set of volunteer editors reading the page then. We apologize for not being able to help you at this time."

Protocol

If a question has gone unanswered for three days, feel free to deploy this response underneath. Sign it as usual.

This is a voluntary endeavour. If you don't want to use it, don't.

Background

(Amended from the RefDesk talk page.)

Sometimes a reader asks a question and we fail to provide an answer; I'd like us to do better. Let me be more precise:

• a reader: often an anonymous one, and thus for all we know making their first attempt to engage with the refdesks
• asks a reasonable question: one that is fully within our remit and which a reference library certainly ought to be able to handle
• and we fail: specifically in the sense that no answer at all is forthcoming.

The example that causes me to write this is Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities#First_US_State_Dinner The first US State Dinner. It is not the only one.

I'll head off digressions by saying at once:

• no answer may be better than a wrong one
• unsourced speculation to fill a void is not helpful
• there is no obligation on any of us volunteers to research any query that does not pique our interest.

However, doesn't the querent deserve better than nothing? Being ignored can be a very odd feeling - exacerbated electronically.

Discussion

Pointing to other services

How do we feel about mentioning other online reference/answer services like 1) Quora 2) stackexchange 3) Ask Yahoo 4) Ask Reddit 5) AskScience (reddit) etc? My feeling is that Quora is certainly fine, but we should almost certainly not direct traffic to Ask Yahoo. The rest are somewhere in the middle. Ask Reddit is pretty crappy too, but their AskScience is not especially worse than our ref desks, and sometimes better. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:16, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

I don't use any of them regularly, so I'm not in a position to comment. One idea: we could create a separate page, with an annotated and changeable list, and link to it in this stock answer. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 15:43, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Proposed extension

In some circumstances, something similar could be deployed on a question that does have responses, if it is deemed the responses to not contain sufficient references.

Other

Overall I like the content, but it seems a good chunk too long. I've trimmed a bit, would be happy to go further next week. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:17, 3 November 2016 (UTC)