On 12/5/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Edit screens also tell people to use reliable sources. I would equally unforgiving with someone who adds unsourced edits as someone who starts unsourced articles.
Absolutely. There are some differences though. Article deletion is much harder to revert. That's probably the biggest one. Also, people often revert changes to an article which changes it from a massive unreferenced one to a short factual stub. I used to do that a lot with articles on VFD, I'd change long articles on people with absolutely no sources to "Blah Whoever might be a person." and I'd find that some long time editor would revert me. Maybe that's just a VFD thing, though. Then there are the other issues, like the fact that New Page Patrol is possible whereas New Edit Patrol isn't (at least not without some technical resources). Watchlists are effective for edits but not as effective for new pages. It's the same principles, but it's a different beast.
It really depends on how you look at eventualism. The way I see it, it's fine to remove information as long as its still in the edit history. If some logged in user wants to actually go through the trouble of looking up the information and adding it back, that's great. If not, well, it's still there for someone to find eventually. But if an article is reduced to a single verifiable sentence (which would be easy for a new page patroller to do), is it going to get speedy deleted, and the information lost forever?
If anyone can verify it. Go ahead. But if it can't be verified, we shouldn't be leaving it in Wikipedia. It breaks basic policy.
Mgm
Well, there's also the talk page. It's OK to leave most unverified information there. But that's another difference with new pages. For some reason most admins insist on deleting the talk page when they delete an article. I think it's even a speedy criterion.
Anthony