Not every article is a biography of a living person.
I am therefore
unwilling to delete large amounts of EXISTING WORK simply because
biographical articles are problematic.
I am quite happy with a process whereby all articles on living people
MUST be sourced by a certain date, or within X days of being tagged.
Perhaps we should identify other categories of article that need to be
sourced to a deadline as well.
I am also happy with a process that says that all new articles after a
specified date must be sourced within X days - although I fear that
the process-happy will turn that into 'all new articles must be
sourced FA-style with inline references for every three words'.
I'm also happy with turning on some kind of stable versions feature
that makes all unsourced articles default-invisible to browsing
readers - but even then, I would wish a 'We have no stable article on
this topic, but we do have an unchecked work-in-progress. Do you want
to see it?' thing for those articles. Remember, the vast majority are
not libellous or harmful, just incomplete or unsourced. In fact, the
attack article many times WILL be sourced.
I am not happy with any process that sends OK articles on
non-contentious subjects to the trash without a conscientious attempt
to find sources.
-Matt
OK, so let's go simply with biographies of living people, and see how it
pans out.
What about:
"any biography of a living person, which altogether lacks sources (other
than webpages directly connected with subject), may be tagged us such.
If no sources are added within seven days, the article may be deleted.
However, such a deletion shall be without prejudice to a sourced
re-creation at a later time [i.e. G4 will not apply, unless the
re-creation is still unsourced]"
We could initially start tagging articles, but suspend deletions for,
say, a month - that would allow time for cleaning up of the current
stock. The tagging would create a large category of 'unsourced BLPs'
which people could start sourcing to minimise deletions.
Bear in mind this policy is simply asking for a source - any source - so
it is a very low threshhold. But it would perhaps start to change how we
think about quality and inclusion.
Doc