--- David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/03/2008, bobolozo bobolozo@yahoo.com wrote:
Based on the recent "Unreliable sources, or no
sources
at all?" thread, it appears that the great
majority of
the members of this list have major disagreements
with
Wikipedia:Verifiability.
What you mean is, you don't like having it pointed out to you that WP:RS is not a reliable robotic rule, and you're looking for ax excuse to go ahead and do it anyway. Considering you had sitting arbitrators responding to you and telling you that you were wrong, you may wish to consider the possibility that you were wrong.
- d.
What I meant was exactly what I said. If I merely wanted an excuse to pull references from hundreds of articles, I would have done it without bothering to ask anyone about it here, just as I didn't bother asking anyone about pulling the urban dictionary references.
If the disagreement with what I had originally proposed, removing unreliable sources from large numbers of articles, had been because people in general are wary of mass action of that sort, or because people wanted to make sure that I was careful not to remove references in the few limited situations where personal websites are acceptable references, or because people thought that some of the time when the reference was removed the text the reference was supporting would need to be removed as well while other times it shouldn't be, so I would need to be careful to make sure I was doing the right thing, I could understand that.
However, after reading the various responses and WP:V and thinking about it all, what I found surprising was that the majority here were actually saying, "No no, even if a source is totally unreliable, don't remove it, any source is better than no source". And even at times "Personal websites may be ok if they're well written and seem to be accurate", which is the sort of understanding of "reliable sources" one generally has to correct in new and unexperienced editors.
If this group of wikipedia editors, which are probably the most experienced editors around and which as you pointed out contains sitting arbitrators, if this group believes that totally unreliable sources should be left in place, which is in fundamental opposition to the letter and spirit of Wikipedia:Verifiability, then we have a problem.
____________________________________________________________________________________ You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost. http://tc.deals.yahoo.com/tc/blockbuster/text5.com