On 3/30/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
If the information does not have a specific source attached to it such
as a page in a book or the equivalent, it is unsourced. You are not obligated to read whole books when no page is given. The priority needs to go to 4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles
and probably extends to removing such material when that is all that is in the article, even if it is sourced.
The problem with living bios goes beyond unsourced material. Everything in a bio could be sourced and it might still be an unfair portrait of the person. Then there's the problem of Wikpedia editors hunting down every tiny bit of published material from decades ago, thereby reviving stories that were long dead, or posting something that was published only in a local newspaper, thereby turning it into an international story.
But if you try to remove material like that from a bio, or delete a bio entirely because it's inherently unfair, a great hue and cry goes up about censorship, and a revert war begins.
Sarah
In that case we should find some way to attach a different weight to material that some consider unfair. Material from international sources over national sources which in turn are more weighty than local sources. People tend to give more attention to controversy and accusations, which unless that's what a person is primarily known for, should be kept to a reasonable size within the article.
Mgm