[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Ryan Delaney]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
snip
> And what benefit was there *really*? I see a lot of mindless fetishism
> of sourcing here, but suppose Cunctator resurrected an article and
> stuck in a random newspaper article for the claim 'Foo was married in
> 1967.' Nobody disputed that before; nobody disputed that after; no new
> information was added. How *exactly* is the article better? Is it
> better because some hypothetical viewer might one day go, hm, I wonder
> if he really was married in 1967, and will look at the cite and be
> relieved?
snip

This sounds a bit like the "other stuff exists" argument. That is, we
might argue that there are BLPs out there that have one
inconsequential citation whereas the rest of the biography (that may
contain lions, tigers, and bears) is uncited.

That's true, but in this case we are picking low-hanging fruit first.
This is not an argument that we shouldn't delete totally unsourced
BLPs.

- causa sui