Steve Bennett wrote:
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).
It can be really hard to tell the difference when you're not familiar
with the subject matter.
It can be, yes. But as in the Siegenthaler incident, there are cases
where there is an unsourced negative claim that anyone could easily spot
and remove. You don't need to be an expert in anything to know that
claiming someone was briefly suspected of an involvement in the Kennedy
assassinations requires a source and should be instantly removed if
there is no source.
Another reason why chants of "don't just
report the bad articles, fix them!" aren't helpful - if you assume
that whatever is in the article is mostly correct but just needs
reformatting, you end up making matters worse.
Totally! What you do in such a case is give the article an aura of
having been checked or written by real Wikipedians, when it's still the
same crap some anon stuck in there in the first place.
In my recent sample, I changed an "External
Links" section to
"Sources". Then something bothered me, I ended up checking out the
links, and realised that the whole article was a puff piece for a
probably non-notable Indian journalist. But I really have no expertise
in determining whether someone is notable, or whether writing for the
Times in India is significant or not. So I tagged the thing
{{POV-check}} and left it.
I wouldn't have felt comfortable blanking/deleting the article.
Assuming that the guy *was* notable, all it really needed was a slight
de-POV tweak and some misleading statements removed.
Right, but this wasn't a "potentially libelous" or negative article, I
assume? If it says "Such and such is a journalist in India, he worked
here, he worked there" then fine, tag it {{POV-check}} and ask for
sources. If it says "Such and such is a NeoNazi activist..." or
"Such-and-such was convicted of rape..." then if there is no source,
blank it!
--Jimbo