[WikiEN-l] good example of overuse of {{fact}}

[Jimmy Wales]

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Oct 16, 2006, at 6:12 PM, jayjg wrote:
> 
>> People keep claiming that it's hard to source "obvious facts";
>> however, in practice that's almost never the case. Obvious facts are
>> generally extremely easy to source.
> 
> A better and more important issue is that it's a waste of time to  
> source obvious facts.

I think that, being reasonable people, we all more or less agree about 
this.  That is to say, obvious facts do not need to be sourced, and if 
someone wants to challenge them (to disrupt things) one easy enough way 
to deal with the is to provide the cites.

All I really meant to guard against was the notion that a firm policy of 
"source it or remove it" for controversial points does not have to lead 
us down some bad path where people start removing obvious facts just to 
tweak us.

If someone went to 100 articles and removed a dozen sentences from each 
with no explanation other than "unsourced" and they were removing 
patently obvious facts, that is a behavioral issue that can be dealt 
with separately.

--Jimbo