Jimmy Wales wrote:
Delirium wrote:
There's no reason to *delete* a 2-sentence unverified stub, merely to make clear to our readers that it is in fact a 2-sentence unverified stub, and so ought to be read accordingly. Of course, an intelligent reader already ought to be able to recognize that for themselves, but we can help the rest along.
In many many cases there is a reason to delete a 2-sentence unverified stub. We need to be extremely aggressive about doing so when the article in question contains negative claims about any living person or existing company. Such articles may be examples of people using our site to attempt to libel others or they may just be hurtful to someone who is non-notable for no good purpose.
I am always dismayed when I see a good editor wikifying and tagging an absolute crap article, rather than blanking/radically stubbing it (at a minimum) or deleting it (often would be better).
That's not "in many cases"; that's "in almost no cases". Take a look through our multiple hundreds of thousands of stubs; almost none of them are negative claims. The vast majority are simple matter-of-fact but unsourced things, like "[x] is a commune in the French departement [y]".
I would accept a policy of "delete unverified claims that seem like they might be non-neutral, non-factual, or at least controversial", but that's quite different from "delete all unreferenced stubs".
-Mark