-----Original Message----- From: Slim Virgin [mailto:slimvirgin@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 06:47 PM To: fredbaud@waterwiki.info, 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun
On 3/29/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
If the information does not have a specific source attached to it such as a page in a book or the equivalent, it is unsourced. You are not obligated to read whole books when no page is given. The priority needs to go to 4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles and probably extends to removing such material when that is all that is in the article, even if it is sourced.
The problem with living bios goes beyond unsourced material. Everything in a bio could be sourced and it might still be an unfair portrait of the person. Then there's the problem of Wikpedia editors hunting down every tiny bit of published material from decades ago, thereby reviving stories that were long dead, or posting something that was published only in a local newspaper, thereby turning it into an international story.
But if you try to remove material like that from a bio, or delete a bio entirely because it's inherently unfair, a great hue and cry goes up about censorship, and a revert war begins.
Sarah
Yep, that's what happens, but folks need to know that one side is right, the other side wrong. There is no limit to removal of unsourced crap. Repeatedly putting crap back in will, eventually, result in sanctions.
Fred
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Fred Bauder wrote:
The problem with living bios goes beyond unsourced material. Everything in a bio could be sourced and it might still be an unfair portrait of the person.
Yep, that's what happens, but folks need to know that one side is right, the other side wrong. There is no limit to removal of unsourced crap. Repeatedly putting crap back in will, eventually, result in sanctions.
Am I missing something here? That wasn't about "unsourced crap", it was about sourced-but-biased material, which is different.
Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Fred Bauder wrote:
The problem with living bios goes beyond unsourced material. Everything in a bio could be sourced and it might still be an unfair portrait of the person.
Yep, that's what happens, but folks need to know that one side is right, the other side wrong. There is no limit to removal of unsourced crap. Repeatedly putting crap back in will, eventually, result in sanctions.
Am I missing something here? That wasn't about "unsourced crap", it was about sourced-but-biased material, which is different.
I am not sure about what example you had in mind Ken, but in this thread there have been two main examples:
The tv reporter about whom it was claimed that she had a rock star brother... no source.
The Mugabe children case, which was not "sourced but biased" but rather appears to have been a totally fabricated pseudo-source that admittedly had the *formatting* of an actual source.
--Jimbo