On Sun, 14 Jan 2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
And to tell you the truth, I don't think unreliable info is useful to begin with.
Precisely. If you want unreliable info, uncyclopaedia has much which is authoritatively unreliable.
This ignores the fact that reliability is a continuum. People are not really saying "we'd rather have a lot of articles that are unreliable instead of 10% as many articles which are reliable". They're saying "we'd rather have a lot of articles instead of 10% of articles which are *somewhat more* reliable". Unsourced material is less reliable than sourced material, but it's not so much less reliable that its reliability may as well be zero.
It's a tradeoff between reliability and usefulness. And even if we *don't* allow unsourced articles, we still must make that tradeoff. Allowing unsourced articles just pushes over a tradeoff that we are already making anyway.