On 12/13/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
In my mind verifiable, as used in Wikipedia, implies that it is easily verifiable.
I have to disagree, for most applicable meanings of "easily". I can verify lots of stuff by going down to my son's college library; if I cite a review paper in Nature or a graduate-level textbook, odds are the average joe won't be able to just click on Google and find a reliable verification, and his local reference library probably won't carry it.
I'd say that qualifies as easily verifiable, as long as you cite the source. And as for the graduate-level textbooks, I'd say the vast majority of the information in them *is* available in Google Print.
If something is asserted without providing any source, and a quick good faith effort to find a source fails, I'd say verifiability has failed.
Well at the moment we've got some editors openly defending the practice of deleting without *any* good faith search, so this is an improvement.
I'd defend that practice in the case of an article which didn't even bother providing a source. But I think a good compromise is to allow admins to tag the article, let a second person make the good faith effort, and let a third person delete it. These could be the same person, or different people.
My latest proposal suggested that articles were merely moved to the user namespace, 24 hours after creation, and only after the user was notified and a good faith effort to locate a source had failed.
Leaving it in main namespace with a notice is better because the article may still be useful, and if it's accessible it may be edited to add references. I don't see what good is done by moving to a user namespace.
It provides extra incentive to add references. It makes it more clear that the article is not acceptable as part of our mainstream content. It takes it out of mirrors like that of Answers Corporation, which don't mirror the user namespace. And I believe it makes it ineligible for that waste of time called AFD.
Anthony