On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:58 AM, doc wrote:
- Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the
subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days. 3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
And lest anyone think I'm being hysterical here, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ferrero. (Found though random pages. Took me about 20 to find a good example.) This is a prime example of the sort of article our sourcing fever doesn't really think through. It's a stub or barely above a stub. It has more or less purely factual information, and has a link to the subject's official site. Anyone who wants to know about Carlos Ferrero is well served by this article - they get a general overview and a link to his website. Less useful if you don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing we'd be hard pressed for comprehensive English-language sources on him anyway. (We'd get a good number, but most of them would be incomplete and writing an article out of them would involve a lot of very messy stitching together.)
The article is firmly in the large class of articles that is good enough to keep up but not good enough to call done. It should not be speedied, prodded, or deleted through any other means. It should be edited. If that takes a while, it takes a while, but that's OK because the article is serving a useful purpose right now. (Heck, I just learned something from it!)
-Phil