Gwern Branwen wrote:
"Andrew Gray" writes:
I did this some time ago for the contents of [[Category:Rapists]] and
its ilk; unsourced claims were removed, and in the few cases where
they constituted the entirety of the article, were replaced with a
prod tag saying "no verifiable assertion of significance is left after
defamatory unsourced assertions removed, so a contentless article", or
words to that effect.
I suspect I had about a one in three success rate and a lot of people
screaming about disruption... and sourcing their articles.
I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that - people are willing to *briefly* do heroic feats of editing, if they feel it will satisfy one maniac and just get him off their and their articles' collective backs, but to expect them to do it again and again as a routine matter of course is quite a stretch.
The category that Andrew chose to work on is one where one could reasonably expect a lot of unsourced nonsense. This would not be so easy in a more respectable category where more good but unsourced material may be found.
Ec