Jimmy Wales wrote:
Delirium wrote:
There's no reason to *delete* a 2-sentence
unverified stub, merely to
make clear to our readers that it is in fact a 2-sentence unverified
stub, and so ought to be read accordingly. Of course, an intelligent
reader already ought to be able to recognize that for themselves, but we
can help the rest along.
In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified
stub. We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the
article in question contains negative claims about any living person or
existing company. Such articles may be examples of people using our
site to attempt to libel others or they may just be hurtful to someone
who is non-notable for no good purpose.
I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an
absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a
minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).
That's not "in many cases"; that's "in almost no
cases". Take a look
through our multiple hundreds of thousands of stubs; almost none of them
are negative claims. The vast majority are simple matter-of-fact but
unsourced things, like "[x] is a commune in the French departement [y]".
I would accept a policy of "delete unverified claims that seem like they
might be non-neutral, non-factual, or at least controversial", but
that's quite different from "delete all unreferenced stubs".
-Mark