Carl Beckhorn wrote:
On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 10:19:47PM -0700, Todd Allen wrote:
Sourcing is a requirement from the very first edit made to an article. Not a nicety, not something you kinda work at before you're ready to bring it to FA or GA, a requirement. Just like articles should -never- be POV, they should -never- be unsourced. It's not "okay for a while."
You certainly know that that opinion doesn't reflect either current policy or practice on enwiki. About the only thing that's generally agreed upon is that sourcing is important. I have personally worked on adding sources to unsourced articles, but the articles were still quite useful to a reader before I added sources.
- Carl
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It may or may not. (I've actually seen about an even split between "get rid of it" and "leave it around, someone may source it", but certainly it's common, if disputed and not universal, philosophy and practice.) That being said, I can certainly state that I fully agree with it. While I agree there may be cases where articles were "useful", for one, "useful" is for good reason an argument to avoid against deletion (travel guides are useful, dictionaries are useful, how-to guides are useful, that doesn't mean we should -have- any of those), and for another, there may be articles which are worse than nothing, containing false, outdated, or inaccurate information. Without sources, there's simply no way to know.
And whether or not it reflects -current- practice, I can certainly say things -should- be done that way.