On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
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.
A quick analysis - I prodded 11 articles this way. Two were deleted; nine survived. Of those, eight are now sourced and one is still unsourced. The prodded people were entirely those whose notability depended solely on an unsourced assertion of criminal behaviour. This doesn't include a half-dozen more sportsmen, etc, where defamatory unsourced claims were removed and the article still asserted notability.
I did a swathe of "non-notable criminals" at the same time - people who had been convicted of some offence or another, ranging from rape to 'abuse of trust', and were being listed in Wikipedia, The Sex Offender Registry You Can Edit, albeit with sources. About one in three of those were deleted, which isn't bad going.