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