----- "Tony Sidaway" <tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/5/09, Phil Nash <pn007a2145(a)blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
I took a quick look the other day at the
categories of unsourced
articles, which go back to December 2006; to be honest, I don't currently
have the time or will myself to trawl through what is a Sisyphean task. Even
limiting that to BLP articles is more than enough to tax the stamina of most
volunteer editors. It's easy enough to begin a stub, and as easy to tag as
unsourced, but it does take some commitment to take the bricks and fashion a
mansion, which I think we should be doing.
I feel strongly that biographies of living people without sources
should be deleted on sight. They can always be recreated by someone
who possesses at least one reliable source.
Working with some other editors, I started [1] to go through older unsourced living people
biographies (BLPs) and either add references or propose for deletion under the criteria
for speedy deletion (CSD), the proposed deletion process (PROD) or the Articles for
Deletion process (AfD). Attack pages and pages on people which don't assert notability
can be speedy deleted under CSD and PROD can be used for the others if they haven't
been PRODed/AfDed before. However, many editors think that neutral unreferenced articles
shouldn't be PRODed or AFDed unless the proposer has first made an effort to find
sources themselves (see guideline [[WP:BEFORE]]). In my experience being an unreferenced
BLPs is not enough to persuade editors that it should be deleted - despite being a clear
breach of the BLP policy and hence grounds for deletion; it's more likely to succeed
if you can show that it's non-notable.
There are 51,000 unreferenced BLPs at the moment [2] - about 13% of the number of articles
in category living people and 2% of all articles. Using Twinkle it takes me about 5-10
seconds to propose CSD, PROD or AFD; checking sources takes me about 5 minutes and adding
new sources and improving expanding articles takes about an hour.
Clearly whether we allow "deletion on sight" or require proposers to improve
articles first makes a big difference to whether this backlog will ever be cleared.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AndrewRT/Unreferenced_BLPs
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unreferenced_BLPs
Andrew