--- David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 25/03/2008, bobolozo <bobolozo(a)yahoo.com>
wrote:
Based on the recent "Unreliable sources, or
no
sources
at all?" thread, it appears that the great
majority of
the members of this list have major
disagreements
with
Wikipedia:Verifiability.
What you mean is, you don't like having it pointed
out to you that
WP:RS is not a reliable robotic rule, and you're
looking for ax excuse
to go ahead and do it anyway. Considering you had
sitting arbitrators
responding to you and telling you that you were
wrong, you may wish to
consider the possibility that you were wrong.
- d.
What I meant was exactly what I said. If I merely
wanted an excuse to pull references from hundreds of
articles, I would have done it without bothering to
ask anyone about it here, just as I didn't bother
asking anyone about pulling the urban dictionary
references.
If the disagreement with what I had originally
proposed, removing unreliable sources from large
numbers of articles, had been because people in
general are wary of mass action of that sort, or
because people wanted to make sure that I was careful
not to remove references in the few limited situations
where personal websites are acceptable references, or
because people thought that some of the time when the
reference was removed the text the reference was
supporting would need to be removed as well while
other times it shouldn't be, so I would need to be
careful to make sure I was doing the right thing, I
could understand that.
However, after reading the various responses and WP:V
and thinking about it all, what I found surprising was
that the majority here were actually saying, "No no,
even if a source is totally unreliable, don't remove
it, any source is better than no source". And even at
times "Personal websites may be ok if they're well
written and seem to be accurate", which is the sort of
understanding of "reliable sources" one generally has
to correct in new and unexperienced editors.
If this group of wikipedia editors, which are probably
the most experienced editors around and which as you
pointed out contains sitting arbitrators, if this
group believes that totally unreliable sources should
be left in place, which is in fundamental opposition
to the letter and spirit of Wikipedia:Verifiability,
then we have a problem.
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