Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com On 11/30/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
What I meant is that _in Wikipedia,_ uncited material is not high- quality material.
What do you mean by "high quality"?
Well, according to the verifiability policy, content is _not supposed to go into Wikipedia at all_ unless it's sourced.
I'd say that content that isn't supposed to be in Wikipedia at all can hardly be considered to be "high quality" _for Wikipedia_.
That's going to be my last reply, as it seems to me that basically you do not agree with the verifiability policy.
The verifiability policy has never been a hardline policy, but a guideline and something to aim towards. When it was first adopted, nobody thought it meant that we should summarily delete the 80%+ of the encyclopedia that at the time was unsourced. Instead what it meant was that we should begin going through and adding sources to it.
In general some amount of common sense is required. Claims that are almost certainly true but uncited should be left in and have a citation supplied---this is what the {{fact}} tag is for. Claims that are surprising or unlikely should be removed or moved to the talk page, pending some verification that they actually are true. Claims that are negative claims about a living individual should be treated in the second manner by default. We wouldn't have a living-persons policy, a {{fact}} template, or any number of other such things if our verifiability policy were that all unsourced statements should be summarily deleted.
-Mark