Matthew Brown wrote:
On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 2:23 PM, bobolozo bobolozo@yahoo.com wrote:
As far as I can tell, this statement that one should never remove a source without replacing it or removing the text it supports, this is not contained in any of our policies or guidelines.
Perhaps it isn't, perhaps it is. It is, however, the /spirit/ of what we should be doing on Wikipedia. Policy and guideline pages are constantly modified by people with vested interests in having them say things that support their positions; I would not trust them.
Removing sources is contrary to the spirit of the encyclopedia and the point of our sourcing policies. Obviously you can contrive a situation when one would do it; however, no Wikipedia policy is set in stone, deliberately.
Having information in Wikipedia that is wholly lacking in sources is poorer information to information that is properly sourced to a second-rate source. That information has provenance. You can go and look up the source. You can try to find out where that source in turn got its information.
This all assumes that the "source" says what it is claimed to have said. No source at all is preferable to sources that support specious original research. Strung together these sources, which may each individually be valid, can support a "Da Vinci Code" style of reasoning. Properly sourced from second-rate sources is still better than poorly sourced from first-rate sources.
I agree that policy churning has resulted in policies that cannot themselves be viewed as reliable sources for anybody's actions. Some have said before that other Wikipedia articles should not be acceptable as reliable sources; that approach could as easily be applied to policy pages.
Ec