On Tue, 16 May 2006 16:30:15 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I can NOT emphasize this enough.
There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative "I heard it somewhere" pseudo information is to be tagged with a "needs a cite" tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about
I cannot agree with such a general statement that encompasses "all information".
It is worth noting that the German WP is quite successful while _not_ sourcing information the way the English one does.
Compare the featured articles of the past few days and you will find that typical English FAs contain several dozen footnotes and German FAs have just "Literatur" sections [1].
Random speculation and hearsay is usually stated as fact -- few editors start by saying "I heard somewhere that ...". Many if not most claims in WP are not specifically sourced. If we removed all unsourced information because we can't tell the difference between unsourced and untrue, we would lose a good portion of the useful content in WP.
Roger
[1] They appear to be in constant violation of their own guide that looks very much like [[WP:CITE]] (stating, among other thing: "Wichtige oder strittige Aussagen sollten detailliert in Form von Einzelnachweisen belegt werden."). Even the recent FA on the death penalty ([[de:Todesstrafe]]) doesn't contain any important or disputed claims that would need to be sourced individually. Or so it seems.