Steve Bennett wrote:
Which of these statements most closely matches what
you want us to do:
1) Remove all unsourced[1] material from all articles
2) Remove all unsourced material from all biographies, and unsourced
harmful material from all articles
3) Remove all unsourced harmful or slightly dubious sounding material
from biographies and other articles
4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles
It's a question of priorities, isn't it? It's also a question of
default attitudes around various interesting questions.
Clearly, our goal should be to source just about everything. Granted
that it would be impossible to do that in one fell swoop. Therefore,
the quality of Wikipedia will improve in stages.
The key is that the community of good editors needs to give good strong
firm social support to people who are doing this.
Imagine there is a small wikipedia out there which is just starting up,
an important language in the developing world which is just getting a
community. They might choose to be incredibly tolerant of someone who
would write something like "Tokyo is the largest city in Japan with a
population of 40 million." It is not a harmful statement, but it is
wrong. But it is better than nothing.
English Wikipedia is not at that stage anymore. We should not accept
random "I heard it somewhere" information nearly as easily as we would
when we were young... even information that is not harmful per se.