Deleting poorly sourced articles that cannot be improved is not a bad idea. Enshrining the idea that we must do so on the level of policy, however, is a terrible idea. Why? It is something we must do. I guess the difference is that people like you think it's just "not a bad idea" and a necessary evil. I think it improves the encyclopedia. Seeing crap stubs that have sat uncited and untouched for years go down the tube is a relief. I don't have to worry about some newspaperman latching on to them or little billy getting an F over them. On Feb 1, 2008 4:03 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Steven Walling wrote: You don't have to worry about those things *anyway*. Wikipedia didn't get to be where it is today by worrying about what some newspaperman was going to say, and it's never a good thing to obsess over.

On Feb 2, 2008 12:39 AM, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: I do not buy this argument. It's quite clear that deleting articles about, say, individual Will and Grace episodes or minor Battlestar Galactica characters will not make those articles' editors go "oh well, you're right, guess Ill go and improve the New South Wales Railway Crossings articles". You're just turning those editors away. Michel

On 02/02/2008, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: I think that this is a good idea. That way the people that make the decisions on notability are more likely to have a firm handle on what is notable in the particular area they are using. One of the problems in the wikipedia and the *world* is that people tend to deny the importance of things they are not familiar with; and the wikipedia tends to reflect that, and that tends to cause deletionism. That's a subtle form of OR though. It's OR that the TV series is important enough to be in the encyclopedia in the first place. How could anyone ever remove anything? How could anyone ever prove or disprove that an untraceable editor had nothing to do with the TV series in the first place? At least if it's we trace the notability to a reliable source then self-interested articles are much less likely, and it's fairly unambiguous whether we can add it or not. There needs to be some rules, and the rules need to more or less work. These rules more or less do work. Mmm. But is it a beautiful baby? If there's not even any 3rd party information on it, probably not, except to its parents. Aren't we mostly trying to collect the shiny stones that are lying on the beach that is this world, the ones that people are interested in, not just the dull rocks? -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

On 02/02/2008, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Because making a DVD from scratch isn't difficult or particularly expensive, so you're basically letting anybody use the wikipedia for what amounts to a webspace and using it to 'summarise' their own work. If we don't have any space limits then the wikipedia is a webspace? I think we're really trying to make an encyclopedia, not with articles that people are interested in writing, but interested in *reading*; and unless you have a better idea, you need a good metric on what people are likely to be interested in reading. Notability at least has the virtue of implying that somebody or an organization with a reputation to protect is saying that something is good and if it is good then people will be much more likely to be interested in reading about it. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

On 02/02/2008, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com> wrote: If it's trivial then it's trivial to reference to a particularly episode. Yes. I would quibble with 'inherently' but yes, in practice they are going to be notable. So if the episode is notable, you can reference it without any issue whatsoever as a source. That is not OR unless Picard was wearing a hat throughout the episode! Provided any reasonable person with that source would draw precisely the same conclusion, you're safe, just the same as if anyone reading a textual source would draw the same conclusion. There doubtless are encyclopedias on Star Trek (or there could be). No, it can be a major problem if you don't assert it, I've had people engage in it to change a major article, that was referenced by news organisations, to make it read the way they want, for what were very probably political aims, and in the same article an individual summarised a source to make it read precisely the opposite of what the source said, in a bad faith way; with multiple reverts back when it was pointed out, for what seemed to me to be at the time, their own personal financial gain. But the vast, vast majority of people are very well meaning. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

By and large, the only people who are hurt by stubby articles or by articles on allegedly non-notable subjects are the subset of Wikipedia editors who wring their hands over the constructed worry that these articles make us look less "serious". I don't think they make us look less serious. I don't care how they make us "look" at all. I care about how accurate the information we provide to millions of people that rely on us is. On Feb 1, 2008 7:38 PM, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:

On Feb 1, 2008 7:42 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm glad that that's not your problem with them, but I think it is frequently an issue behind some peoples' issues with certain article topics and not others. -Matt

Alex Sawczynec wrote: When deletionists run too fast they soon run out of breadth. Ec

On Feb 4, 2008 4:53 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Episodes_an… - GC

Time? Why should you be creating new stubs that are unsourced at all? I don't create an article unless I have source material available. It kills the need for debate 90% of the time (literally, that's my ratio of creations to AFDs). On Feb 1, 2008 4:04 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:

That was the original idea, I agree, but we've moved on from that. We long ago accepted that simply adding what you know doesn't work since there is no way for people to trust it. We now do require people source things, we just aren't very good at enforcing it (I believe it was Jimbo that said people shouldn't be tagging dubious statements with {{fact}}, they should just be removing them completely).

Steven Walling wrote: Challenge it, certainly. That's how to improve it. Delete it, not so much. Deleting an article generally _doesn't_ improve it. I've been arguing for years that we could avoid this entire fundamental conflict if only we could finally get flagged revisions of some sort. Then the deletionists could be made happy by flagging uncited articles so that they don't show up on DVDs or what have you, and the inclusionsists could be made happy by not having half-finished articles deleted. _Massive_ sigh.

On Fri, 1 Feb 2008, Carl Beckhorn wrote: This is susceptible to troublemakers being able to cause trouble by following the rules. They just have to come through and arbitrarily challenge random facts to cause trouble, or even challenge facts that they know are true, but which they don't like.

On Feb 1, 2008, at 7:20 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote: {{fact}} Or, to be less cavalier, we now require sourcing as the major way to resolve accuracy disputes. We do not, as a matter of policy, and never have required sourcing for things that nobody is suspicious of, and we do not encourage any sort of Cartesian doubt. Or, if we do, it's a new and foolish development. -Phil

On 02/02/2008, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: And that's a bag thing.

On Feb 1, 2008 4:59 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: I hate to follow myself up, but... Getting consensus on a single policy page is different than getting consensus of the community. The policy page wonks (those here, and there) need to be aware of the difference. If you assault a problem that has intimate interconnections out through the rest of the project from the narrow perspective of any corner, the results will be disaster. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Feb 1, 2008, at 7:59 PM, George Herbert wrote: I disagree, actually - this attitude assumes that information can be broken down to a sort of atomic level where citations exist on a line- by-line basis. This does not seem to me to be true. -Phil

Oh indeed. Wikipedia itself is tagged with a giant {{fact}} tag ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer). And the finish product is "featured articles" and even then those typically have room for improvement. People should not treat wikipedia like a inished product. It isn't and it will never ever be complete as human knowledge grows over time. On Feb 2, 2008 5:21 AM, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:

Steven Walling wrote: Um, no, we're not forgetting that. We would assert that the articles in direct violation of policies that have nothing to do with notability should be deleted on those other bases, and that we don't need sweeping new notability policies which can and will be used to delete great swaths of harmless articles which *don't* run afoul of those other policies.

On 02/02/2008, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: I was thoroughly amused to open enwp this morning and find a notice telling me an article I created had been prod-tagged. (Someone has a bot set up to do this, now. Good for them) So, I go to look. "It is proposed that this article be deleted because of the following concern: As per Wikipedia policy, small-town mayors are not notable just for being mayors." Ah, the impeccable timing of coincidence. (The *guideline* - not policy - says, incidentally, that "Municipal politicians are not inherently notable just for being in politics, but neither are they inherently non-notable just because they're in local politics - evaluate each case on its own individual merits." The town in question is the thirteenth-largest city in a European nation.) I can't quite remember why I wrote this article. I think I was expecting someone to expand it and wanted to give them a kick-start. Ah, well, untagged now, it's not hurting anyone. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On Feb 1, 2008 10:28 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm aghast at the general direction this thread seems to be taking, a direction quite well-summarised by your email. Unreferenced != unuseful != embarrassing. I've deleted hundreds if not thousands of articles, but deletionism has been taken to a degree that I don't think any of us original deletionists imagined it would be. My first thought when I read the initial email was "Wait, this is what the inclusionists used to demand - a codified policy on what we should delete based on verifiability as opposed to notability." But from the emails in this thread, it seems that this policy is going to be interpreted in a ludicrous way. Wikipedia is a work in progress. We should not expect articles to be perfect or complete, and that extends to citations. So we have some unreferenced material. Cry me a fucking river. The only unreferenced material that should concern is that which is potentially controversial or otherwise could land us in a pile of deep shit. There are of course good intentions behind this policy, but I see no reason to fix something that isn't broken. We're already getting rid of articles about garage bands and other worthless pieces of crap, and even then, only "much" of the deleted articles are actually this bad, going by *your* words. The present guidelines are already working to throw out the worthless material submitted to us. Why do we need to fix something that isn't broken, and thereby now make articles on obscure third world politicians or obscure third world brands of instant noodles verboten, all for the sake of cackling at some stupid garage band's lack of verifiability/notability? I might be okay with this policy if everyone else read it the same way I would - that unverifiable, controversial information should be deleted, and that depending on the situation, unverifiable information can also be deleted. But it seems clear to me that the hordes of morons who now call themselves deletionists want anything unverifiable deleted, and don't care that they haven't presented much of a coherent case for changing a policy that is already accomplishing their own stated goals, and that is already, according to them, throwing out material that might not be so shitty. Johnleemk

On Feb 3, 2008 5:05 AM, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: Is it really your intent to claim that every deleted page is sourceable to begin with? If so, why don't those who fight so ardently to save them give them the best bulletproofing you can give--CITE LOTS OF SOURCES? I've had exactly zero of the articles I've created sent to AfD, because I do not write articles without appropriate sourcing -up front-. No one's going to challenge an article that cites a lot of sources, not even if it's a stub. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

On 03/02/2008, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Replace "sources" with "reliable, non-trivial, independent sources", and it's pretty much true.

On 03/02/2008, Jake Waskett <jake(a)waskett.org> wrote: I would say that falls under "non-trivial".

On Feb 3, 2008 10:09 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Is it? [[Daniel Brandt]] immediately to mind. But then I looked at AFD, because Brandt's article is obviously a nonstandard case. [[January 2008 stock market volatility]] was the first article I looked at. 30 sources. Browsing up the list I also saw [[POLICEPAY]] and [[Usher's fifth studio album]], and I didn't look at all that many. But I guess it depends how you want to interpret "reliable" and "non-trivial". If you take a narrow enough view of that, then I guess the chances of having someone "challenge" such an article go down (but still not to zero). But then again, if you take a narrow enough view of that, then sourcing an article well enough to please everyone becomes a very tedious task for a great number of articles. Hit random page 5 or 10 times and see if you can come up with impeccable sources for all of the articles, or if not if you can say with a straight face that they should be deleted.

On 2/3/08, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, but thank you so much for asking. I would hate for that misconception to circulate. You might notice that I said "redeemable page", not "any given page". Bullet resistant, yes. Bulletproof, no. Knife-proof, well... it depends. Good work, but hopefully I don't have to tell you what happens when you call too much attention to your winning streak. Make it idiot-proof and somebody will build a better idiot. —C.W.

On 2/4/08, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: By "idiot", I was referring to the typical quixotic nutter who, once he has [insert random stub] in his cross-hairs, will not rest until it is deleted. Many of the tactics used in achieving that goal require talent not possessed by the average idiot. The full arsenal could easily fill an O'Reilly hardcover. —C.W.

WP:V is good to get rid of garbage articles on stuff only an elite number of people know, such as an article on a home video or a garage band which at most family members and etc know about. That was and still is the intention behind WP:N and WP:V. Presence of secondary sources does not necessarily mean a topic is notable. For example every military serviceman has a secondary source covering them, their service record. However not every serviceman is notable. On the other hand you'll find it difficult to find "secondary sources" about certain topics such as articles on settlements or topics concerning low-tech places such as many African countries. Now you would probably find primary sources (official governmental websites for example). Or consider the case of fiction related topics. It may be very difficult to establish Picard to be bald through secondary sources. Of course having more sources on a topic is welcome. No objections there. But the lack of nor the presence of "secondary sources" has little to do with notability. Verifiability yes, notability not. I do not understand this sudden urge to raise our bar so high that we are now thinking of deleting just about a million articles or more. This new trend is counter-productive f it follows the course of mass deletion. Editing wikipedia supposed to be fun. It is not fun when there are self righteous notability zealots who spend their entire time finding excuses to delete articles. We ought to avoid that. Road to hell is paved with good intentions. Lets keep that in mind. It is not beneficial to go to either extreme. - White Cat On Feb 2, 2008 3:02 AM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:

Philip Sandifer wrote: Just last night I spent an evening going through several hundred articles about various remote galaxies tidying up the usage of a template I'd changed. Most were identified only by NGC number and many of the ones that did have a photograph had only a blurry smudge that didn't mean much to anyone except a professional astronomer. I find it hard to believe that the subjects of most of those articles were even remotely in the same ballpark of notability as a random episode from the TV show Scrubs, which is watched by millions and has a dedicated fan base. But articles about galaxies are Scholarly, so I don't expect anyone's going to purge that particular pile of minutiae any time soon. Better to go after the stuff that actually _distinguishes_ us from the Traditional and Scholarly encyclopedias.

Steve Summit wrote: There are Chicken Littles who are fearful that the fall of one of these asteroids onto the earth is imminent. Those who go around caterwauling about how these non-notable articles will bring down Wikipedia similarly have nothing better to do than to spread panic in the barnyard. Ec

David Goodman wrote: My intent wasn't to denegrate, I've created my share of NGC object articles myself. My intent was to point out a drastic double standard in notability, whereby things that are of interest to a small number of people but that are "scholarly" get a pass while things that are demonstrably of interest to millions but that are "pop culture" get culled without even AfD debate. IMO it's not a bad thing to have articles on those scholarly topics, it's a bad thing to _not_ have articles on the pop culture ones. That incoming president of Barnard may have fallen into the BLP-specific notability trap similar to the one that's currently eating mayor articles.

geni wrote: What's significant is that even he should see the need to say, "please give us a day or two to work on it for goodness sake" in his summary line. Ec

Steven Walling wrote: The requirements just changed. Should editors have been looking into the future when writing their stubs to take into account what the requirements _would_ be at some point? Wikipedia is a work in progress, a growing, living document that is never "finished." The fact that it's riddled with half-complete, poorly-referenced, and downright messy articles is a feature. It's _supposed_ to be that way. If you want a nice printable version to put on your shelves, don't go around shooting unfinished articles on sight. Lean on the developers to finally get flagged revisions implemented.

Angela wrote: The policy itself is confused, in that case. I've already given an example of how I could write a fully cited and verifiable article using a primary source that would be deleted under the "third-party" requirement in the policy as written. Since TV shows are tainted by popularity, though, perhaps I should use something "scholarly "instead. If I were to write an article about Hamlet and I cited only the text of the play (widely available anywhere) for all of the facts I wrote, is that article unverifiable?

Ian Woollard wrote: But it fails the "third party source" requirement. I'm not saying it's impossible to find third party sources that discuss Hamlet, of course, that would be silly. But I don't see why this is a necessary condition for _verifiability_. You can verify something based purely on primary sources. Not really relevant, though. OR is a whole 'nother policy.

On Feb 2, 2008 1:11 AM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Not really. WP:V even says that it, WP:OR, and WP:NPOV "should not be interpreted in isolation from one another, and editors should try to familiarize themselves with all three." If your only point is that this rule should be filed under WP:OR instead of WP:V, then it's a fairly useless point to debate. I should also point out that the sentence you're talking about says "If no reliable, third-party sources *can be found* for an article topic..." [my em]. Reliable, third-party sources *can be found* for Hamlet, even if the initial article doesn't contain them.

Well, Im the admin who removed the speedy, and it was a clear mis-tagging, but for what strikes the casual reader as esoteric subjects it helps to be very explicit and not assume they will even follow the links, let alone use google. And this is not really the place to complain about other editors. On Feb 7, 2008 9:41 PM, The Mangoe <the.mangoe(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On 08/02/2008, The Mangoe <the.mangoe(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think a lot of the problem is that the nominators feel affronted or cheated when a deletion nomination is challenged - they assume ownership of the deletion nomination and feel they have to fight for it. (I must admit I haven't helped - I have frequently been guilty of stating my opinions of bad nominations in a personal manner, and recently needed to apologise profusely to User:Cirt for my profound dickishness on a deletion matter; I will be trying to do much better in future.) How to depersonalise the process of deletion nomination? - d.

On 08/02/2008, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, they should. It took me a while to learn about Categories, Images and Templates, but i grasped the Watchlist very quickly. That's bad. Let them protest. It's good to see that people care. I had to deal with arguments and protests over deletions. These protesters are usually not stupid at all, even though they often don't understand our rejection of original research. But i don't mind replying to them personally in each case: every time i do it, it makes me understand even better why NOR is a good thing. Not all of us: I listed myself as "willing to adopt" new users. I receive adoption requests every couple of days and stopped counting my adoptees a long time ago. Many of them never return after their initial request, but a few of them keep asking me questions. The questions are all quite the same, but i always give a full personal reply and add a link to a help or policy "for more info ... and feel free to ask me again if you don't understand anything". I never use copy n' paste in these conversations. Some of my adoptees have already become good contributors... -- Amir Elisha Aharoni English - http://aharoni.wordpress.com Hebrew - http://haharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

On 08/02/2008, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote: However even when not copying and pasting anything people do a lot will tend to become standardized (See how may times I've typed out "Hi did you take this pic?") On top of that you hit the problem is that while templates may feel impersonal they may well be a better option than something that expresses the wikipedian's true feelings. -- geni