On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Yes, but the case I'm worried about is one where the targeted article is not libelous or about living people, still would have content if the questionable material is removed, and actually does have sources, but which are not referenced in the recommended one-footnote-per-sentence way. The policy is letting people use the rules to disrupt by picking any of that 80% of articles and saying "you'd better source this, now, or I put your article up for deletion."
Nothing about the verifiability policy requires _inline_ sources.
But that's how it normally is interpreted.
[[Video game crash of 1983]] has gotten even stranger. The user wishing to delete the article has *admitted that the material he's asking for sources for is correct*, and still wants to delete the article unless people provide him with sources for individual statements.
(And the same user, on another article about another subject, objected to someone else's request for individual citations on the grounds that the request for sources was just being used as a "blunt instrument" and that the information was already well-known to someone like him knowledgeable in the field!)
There's a difference between saying "we should source articles" and "we should give users the power to force others to source articles". It's so much easier to tell people to do something than to do it yourself that this often just amounts to legalized disruption.