I like Jimbo's notion of a prod system that says "this is crap, if it is still crap in 7 days I will delete it"
I wonder if we could start this by simply saying "Any article that remains unsourced after being marked as such for 7 days is deleted". It sounds draconian, but we now do it for images, why not articles? No, it will not solve all out problems, but it would be a workable step towards saying that it may be better to have no article for the moment than a crap one.
Of course, if this was introduced overnight, we'd simply have people that like deleting things tagging 400,000 articles, and we'd have no chance of saving the easily sourced ones. I'd suggest a phased approach, each phase introduced at a 2week to 1 month interval.
The phases could be:
1) Any article *totally* unreferenced and uncategorised may be tagged as such, and if not fixed, deleted after 7 says. (Trial phase, putting people on notice, most things would get saved by a simple, and perhaps crap, cat or ref being added - little would actually deleted)
2) Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
If we did it properly, we'd allow time to save most most of the good things - and end up with a policy that said "all unsourced articles get deleted"
Eventually we could tighten it further to demand some quality in the sources.
It isn't a panacea, but it is a start - and it begins a process of making inclusion dependent on article quality and not just the notability of the subject. We need a thin end to our wedge here - something workable and broadly acceptable to our more inclusionist elements. Thoughts?
Doc