[WikiEN-l] Removing unsourced information

Apoc 2400 apoc2400 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 25 00:29:06 UTC 2010


It is commonly said that anyone can remove unsourced information, and that
the burden lies on the editor who wants to include information to provide a
source. I have always taken this to mean that if I think something is wrong
or otherwise does not belong in the article, then I can remove it at will if
there is no source. I did not take it to mean that I could go from article
to article and remove any sentence without a source, for no other reason
than being unsourced. The exception of course if contentious material about
living people, which should be removed right away if unsourced. Am I correct
here? Has the interpretation changed recently?

The question came up of course because of the recent discussions about
unsourced BLPs. While at first it was about BLP articles with no sources, it
seems that some wants to expand it to every sentence in a BLP that does not
have a source. Are we aware that this would probably mean removing well over
half of the information about living people on Wikipedia? I know there are
some who think it is fundamentally immoral to even have openly editable
articles on living people, but how far is Wikipedia willing to go to please
them?


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