On 02/02/2008, Allan Crossman a.crossman@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:

I've arrived late to the discussion of "just deleting" uncited statements in articles. However, I believe that when Jimbo suggested this, he was talking specifically about biographies of living persons, which for legal reasons must follow a stricter standard.

Allan Crossman

There is a current thread somewhere about WP:N and WP:V.

I was just shocked when I tried to quote something out of WP:V today because it looks like something I would have written when I was 11.

From what I can grasp - we should be bold be we should also give editors

time to source because they get very upset, when the time frame you have in mind elapses you delete the word/sentence/paragraph. Although you have to do something on the talk page to avoid something else happening.

WP:V is up there with the ten commandments, magna carta and the declaration of Independance skillfully rewritten by my nephew and his friend and the one they play with because he's very free with candy but not very bright.

Dunno how this will format - but here is the opening (including Jimbos comment about BLPs)

The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material. All quotations and any material *challenged or likely to be challenged*should be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#_note-0The source should be cited clearly and precisely to enable readers to find the text that supports the article content in question.

If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.

An edit lacking a reliable source should be removed, however editors may object to the removal of material before they have had an opportunity to provide references. If you want to request a source for an unsourced statement, consider moving it to the talk pagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Talk_page. Alternatively, you may tag a sentence by adding the {{facthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Fact}} template, a section with {{unreferencedsectionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unreferencedsection}}, or the article with {{refimprovehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Refimprove}} or {{unreferenced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unreferenced}}. Use the edit summary to give an explanation of your edit. You may also leave a note on the talk page or an invisible HTML comment on the article page.[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#_note-1

Do not leave unsourced information in articles for too long, or at all in the case of information about living personshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP. As Jimmy Wales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales has put it:

I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons.

–Jimmy Wales [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#_note-2