On 3/29/07, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere" pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies.
This is a step up from what you have previously requested, namely that we must be ruthless about removing *harmful* unsourced information from biographies.
Which of these statements most closely matches what you want us to do: 1) Remove all unsourced[1] material from all articles 2) Remove all unsourced material from all biographies, and unsourced harmful material from all articles 3) Remove all unsourced harmful or slightly dubious sounding material from biographies and other articles 4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles ...etc.
If the claim made was not harmful (as I don't believe a fictitious family member normally is), and was not implausible (I wouldn't have known), then why would we have removed it? How would we have known?
Steve [1] I don't even know how we determine if a claim is sourced, short of tracking down and reading every source mentioned on the page and looking for it.