On 02/02/2008, Allan Crossman <a.crossman(a)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-0>The
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
page<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Talk_page>ge>.
Alternatively, you may tag a sentence by adding the
{{fact<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Fact>}}
template, a section with
{{unreferencedsection<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unreferencedsection>}},
or the article with
{{refimprove<http://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
persons<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP>LP>.
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>