On 12/27/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
jayjg wrote:
No, a source is only required for anything that is disputed. That's pretty fundamental, WP:V. Quite workable and highly desirable.
The problem with that, of course, is that, given sufficient time and sufficiently many people, _anything_ can and will be disputed, including the color of the sky on a clear day.
Or, let me quote the start of an actual argument from [[Talk:Elision]]:
"Oh, I deliberately used my version of showing speech because I dispute the IPA's. I deny the existence of the schwa, I object to r/R sounds as being difthongs, I refute its status of r and R as consonants but as vowels, I object to its fictive prescription of whether whichever words are aspirated or unaspirated, I object to its using lone or blended glyfs for clusters as careless overlooking of the intention of the key as showing a one-to-one relationship between sound and glyf, and as no part of speech was given to the words in my list. Do you wish to obscure my work from accuracy?"
-- Ilmari Karonen
Right, we can all come up with some extreme example of an absolute madman editing some page. At some point common sense has to prevail, if not the "extreme minority" provisions of [[WP:NPOV]]. But, to get back to the original point, there's no way that a claim that something is "legal consensus" based on a search of some database you've done can ever be considered a "simple fact", or even something that has been "reliably cited". Quote a legal expert or legal tome making that claim.
Jay.