Bryan Derksen wrote:
I think the reason is that our one truly fundamental goal is to write a good, free encyclopedia, and that while attempting to source everything is a good means to that goal if we were to take it to the extreme it would actually start to move us farther away from it. If we were to actually follow through with the absolute full extent of the only-sourced-statements ideal it would devastate Wikipedia's current contents and IMO raise such a barrier to editing that new work would slow to a crawl. We have to consider these costs and find a compromise position that tries to minimize them.
In certain measure this ties back to our old argument about whether we are "free as in beer" of "free as in speech". The former is relatively simple, even if we haven't yet reached perfection in that; copyright policy falls into it. Free as in speech is more elusive. The right of free speech is not the absolut right to sy anything you damn well please without regard to consequences, but if there are to be exceptions to that right those exceptions must be explicit. We cannot knowingly allow defamation or lies. As a private organization we are not confined to only those exceptions that are sanctioned by law; we can also disallow other kinds of speech. We are within our legal rights to impose some kind of notability criterion, but legislating cluefullness remains an impossibility and not an illegality.
We need to constantly remind ourselves about what made this project grow into the giant that we now have. Important as it may be to strive for total reliability, that was not the most important factor in our phenomenal growth. Nor has that growth been based on having only biographies od "notable" people. If these individuals are really so -unnotable, very few people are likely to read those articles anyway.
Ec