Steve Bennett wrote:
I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).
It can be really hard to tell the difference when you're not familiar with the subject matter.
It can be, yes. But as in the Siegenthaler incident, there are cases where there is an unsourced negative claim that anyone could easily spot and remove. You don't need to be an expert in anything to know that claiming someone was briefly suspected of an involvement in the Kennedy assassinations requires a source and should be instantly removed if there is no source.
Another reason why chants of "don't just report the bad articles, fix them!" aren't helpful - if you assume that whatever is in the article is mostly correct but just needs reformatting, you end up making matters worse.
Totally! What you do in such a case is give the article an aura of having been checked or written by real Wikipedians, when it's still the same crap some anon stuck in there in the first place.
In my recent sample, I changed an "External Links" section to "Sources". Then something bothered me, I ended up checking out the links, and realised that the whole article was a puff piece for a probably non-notable Indian journalist. But I really have no expertise in determining whether someone is notable, or whether writing for the Times in India is significant or not. So I tagged the thing {{POV-check}} and left it.
I wouldn't have felt comfortable blanking/deleting the article. Assuming that the guy *was* notable, all it really needed was a slight de-POV tweak and some misleading statements removed.
Right, but this wasn't a "potentially libelous" or negative article, I assume? If it says "Such and such is a journalist in India, he worked here, he worked there" then fine, tag it {{POV-check}} and ask for sources. If it says "Such and such is a NeoNazi activist..." or "Such-and-such was convicted of rape..." then if there is no source, blank it!
--Jimbo