[WikiEN-l] Unsourced biographies

[Andrew Gray]

So, I've been going through the endless barrel of fun that is
[[Category:Rapists]], slapping prod tags on the people of no
encyclopedic significance ("X priest got two years in jail for groping
some choirboys") and, in a couple of cases, encountering entirely
unsourced articles. Perhaps the most obvious of these was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sedley_Alley&oldid=64313689

What ought we to do with them? I mean, policy is aggressively attack
anything unsourced that would be defamation if it was false; where
there were other avenues of notability, I've done that.

But in this case, when we remove all forms of the negative material, we get

> Sedley Alley (August 16, 1955 – June 28, 2006) was married to a military person

...which is in and of itself a candidate for speedy deletion, though I
suspect doing that would get me brickbatted for nefarious deletionism.

What I've done in the three or four cases where I ran across this was
put a prod tag on, saying that we simply cannot have any article of
this form without sources. Better, I feel, to have it deleted than to
have a dodgy article left up (even if the subject's dead, it's still
ethically iffy) I've been told this is "impatience"; I'm jumping past
normal cleanup procedures and slapping a "fix in X days or else"
warning on.

Thoughts? I'm really not convinced we have another way to deal with
things like this that actually works...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk