On Mar 31, 2007, at 12:41 PM, doc wrote:
And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for that..... so it is a poor example.
But what would a second citation add to that article? Or, more to the point, how is the lack of a second citation something so bad that the article should be deleted unless it gets one?
Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5 million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net impact on the project, not one or two cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorran_Democratic_Centre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5 (Only source is the primary source) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_University_Press http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_on_the_Family_Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ferguson_%28organist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Institute_for_the_Certification_of_Computing_Professionals
Would you like me to find more? Now, mind you, I don't know for 100% certain that, for instance, the Focus on the Family Institute is notable. But all of these articles are short, descriptive articles that rely entirely on a primary source.
I also am pretty certain that instead of gutting bad articles what would happen here is that articles on politicians in non-English speaking countries would get gutted. We would lose our coverage on the non-English speaking world rapidly. For instance, that first link - the Andorran Democratic Centre? None of our articles on Andorran political parties would survive this proposal. Neither would our Peruvian politicians.
The need to improve sourcing does not outweigh the need to have some, albeit stubby, coverage in these areas. And putting a seven day timeline on fixing that is not useful - it's a double or nothing gambit that's far, far too likely to leave us with nothing. We cannot allow our sourcing paranoia to gut entire major areas of the encyclopedia.
Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.
Sure it is. We have a pretty good encyclopedia. It's improving. I see little reason to gut its content. Deleting to write a better encyclopedia is like fucking for chastity.
-Phil