Eugene van der Pijll wrote:
K P schreef:
Right now there is a place for some unsourced information, namely in articles tagged that they're unsourced, or "let the reader beware."
That is encouraging a dangerous perception: the place for unsourced information is in articles with {{unsourced}} on top, and therefore Wikipedia guarantees that articles that do not have a template are correct.
Wikipedia should not be guaranteeing anything. If the reader is foolish enough to believe everything we say he deserves the consequences. Collectively we are not going out to intentionally deceive him. We should be encouraging a culture of doubt about everything on the internet including ourselves. More discrete notices about information being unsourced will help that along.
Let's take a random article: [[Shoshone National Forest]]. It contains in the first sentence the assertion that it "spans nearly 2.5 million acres (10,000 km²)". This "fact" is not cited, is not repeated (and cited) later in the article, and cannot be found on any of the sites in "General references". In other words, it is unsourced, even though the article is not tagged (presumably; I have made the {{unsourced}} template invisible in my personal css).
That is no problem however, because if this fact was really important for me, I wouldn't trust Wikipedia anyway, whether it is tagged or not. "Let the reader beware" should be the attitude for all of Wikipedia; sources cited or not.
Hiding the tag doesn't help. When non-controverial facts like this are not sourced we want to encourage the new reader to correct this. The example fact should be an easy one to track down. Doing the easy ones can build a potential editor's confidence.
Ec