Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Spot on. Now, comes a writer and creates that thing of
beauty, and it
is concise and precise and all that. Took hours to boil it down to
that. Oh, the writer didn't source it. The writer knew the subject
very well and simply wrote about what the writer knows. And, the
writer knows, anyone else who knows this subject will recognize the
accuracy of this. I'm not talking about someone simply asserting their own POV.
Used to be, this article might sit there, unsourced for years.
Nowadays, five minutes, speedy deletion tag. "Fails to assert
notability." "No sources."
The ladder that built the project is being chopped away. There is
possibly help coming: flagged revisions. Once we have a means of
discriminating between checked and sourced and polished articles and
those which are perhaps better called "submissions," we might be able
to move beyond the whole deletionist/inclusionist madness. We might
be able to stop stepping on the seeds that could be fostered and
nourished with good editing. If we don't, somebody else will.
Well put. The
often cancerous obsession that some have for notability
and sourcing is as damaging to the future of Wikipedia as the sins that
they are trying to suppress. Admittedly biographies of living persons
require stricter guidelines, but they are an exception. If an article
in most subject areas is started without sources, or an assertion of
notability it's not a big deal. Somebody will add them eventually.
Ec