--- On Fri, 13/5/11, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
From: Mark delirium@hackish.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale) To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, 13 May, 2011, 8:28 On 5/13/11 7:57 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
The job of WP:V is to make sure that assertions in
Wikipedia are
verifiable; it's not to ensure that verifiable stuff cannot be
deleted. Hmm, I suppose I disagree, but then I'm a fairly strong inclusionist; if it's verifiable, it belongs in Wikipedia, cited to the source that verifies it. But I don't think that's incompatible with adopting a stronger line on WP:RS. The main problem here imo is that a certain class of sources (newspapers writing about celebrity rumors) does *not* actually reliably verify anything, therefore we shouldn't treat them as a reliable source that does.
Are there any cases where editors should have discretion to delete *actually* solidly verifiable information, like some piece of physics information sourced to multiple well-respected physics review articles?
I've certainly seen credible arguments made that specific articles would benefit from trimming. Again, this is partly a reflection of where Wikipedia is today, as opposed to 5 or 7 years ago. Where there was an almost blank canvas then, Wikipedia today has many articles that have attracted flotsam and jetsam, while still missing the essential stuff that an encyclopedia should have. It made sense then to safeguard every bit of sourced information, but not necessarily today, when you already have a 12,000-word article on a minor topic.
Examples:
There is a thread on Jimbo's talk page right now, about [[Jacques Derrida]]:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=42...
One of the problems seems to be undue weight on trivia, while the essential stuff is missing.
Here is what a scholar wrote to me some while ago about the Jehovah's Witnesses article:
---o0o---
To take an example of a topic with which I'm familiar - Jehovah's Witnesses - I would really need to start all over again, and I don't know whether it's OK to delete an entire article and rewrite another one, even if I had the time. It's a bit like the joke about the motorist who asked for directions, only to be told, 'If I were you, I wouldn't be starting from here!'
The JW article begins with an assortment of unrelated bits of information, it fails to locate the Witnesses within their historical religious origins, it says it was updated in December 2010 yet ignores important recent academic material. The citations may look impressive, but they are patchy, and sometimes the sources state the exact opposite of what the text conveys. So what does one do?
---o0o---
If you include everything that is verifiable, you may end up with 100,000 words, and a poorly structured article that nobody will ever read.
Coatrack articles are another example where removing sourced information may be necessary. They're also the type of article where undue content is typically defended using a WP:V or WP:RS argument. I've seen BLPs of notable people that discussed at length whether the person was gay/Jewish or not, and no one had much interest in writing about what made the person notable in the first place.
A.