[WikiEN-l] Notability in Wikipedia

[Ian Woollard]

On 28/04/2009, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On 28/04/2009, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>> But, as long as a consensus, with good reason, wish to retain, any
>>> burden is discharged.
>>
>> No.
>>
>> I'm pretty sure that the principle is that any material that isn't
>> referenced to a reliable source can be removed at any time,
>> irrespective of consensus.
>>
>> --
>> -Ian Woollard

> But I was a little surprised to see a lone outpost of sanity in WP:V:
>
> "Any material lacking a reliable source may be removed, but editors
> might object if you remove material without giving them sufficient
> time to provide references, and it has always been good practice, and
> expected behavior of Wikipedia editors (in line with our editing
> policy), to make reasonable efforts to find sources oneself that
> support such material, and cite them."

Yes, and after I've spent 1.5 seconds with google failing to find it,
then the material is gone.

This thing about:

>>> But, as long as a consensus, with good reason, wish to retain, any
>>> burden is discharged.

Is simply a lot of crap; the material has to have a reference or two
or it can go at any time. And that's the bottom line.

This may sound harsh, but it's the only thing that stops people adding OR.

And you might argue that certain things are 'common sense' but I've
spent significant fractions of my time on wikipedia talk pages
laboriously listing multiple sources *in addition* to the reliable
sources in the article to prevent people from replacing referenced
facts with "common sense"... that was actually completely incorrect
and unreferenced. I've had people explain to me that they have
first-hand experience of things... and still get it completely and
utterly wrong.

Bottom line: this is not negotiable.

> --
> gwern

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect
world would be pretty ghastly though.