Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote: Yes, agree. Well, partly. I believe that if you *start* an article, you ought to have the sourcing in front of you. All articles require sourcing, and should have it. So, if you start one, it is highly preferred, you add a source for your assertions/statements.

Bass ackwards. Remedial education for some admins appears to be in order! ;-) I'm sure he'd reword that on consideration. On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:23 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw(a)armory.com> wrote:

Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote: It would make more sense if it read "ultimate responsibility for substantiating inclusion". Ultimate responsibility is not an excuse of first resort, but that's the way so many deletion proposals appear to be framed. So many of these proposals are approached in a way that verification becomes a goal in its own right without regard to need. There may be no evident suggestion of libel or willfully erroneous material; all that is lacking is immediate sourcing. Those who seek deletion should not ignore other steps that would lead to an improved article. If the information is at all plausible, seeking verification oneself is a preferable first step. Any editor can add it. A person can still put doubtful information on the talk page and begin discussion there. If that fails one can also initiate discussion with the contributor of the information. One of the articles in that first list of Kurt's had to do with a Russian-SriLankan joint educational undertaking. Though I do concede that there was much to the article that suggested bias, there was at the same time comment from the inexperienced contributor expressing a desire to work with Wikipedia towards an agreed text. Nowhere was there any attempt to establish a dialogue with that person. This is the kind of inexcusable behaviour that is recently making Wikipedia a butt of jokes, not articles on obscure subjects which limited world views have tagged "not-notable". Notability criteria have become a cesspool of bone-headed ignorance. Some seem to rejoice in claiming fictitiously high and subjective standards, standards which at the same time they fail to apply recursively. Verifiability was originally proposed to confront the vague notion of notability, No Original Research was designed to deal with concepts that could best be described as "off the deep end." Both have since become tools to impose personal POVs. If notability is the _only_ issue, and the proposed solution is to delete the whole article (rather than just individual statements within it) the responsibility for justifying deletion should shift to the person seeking that deletion. At the very least he should show that he has some idea of what he's talking about. How can a person outside of New Zealand who has never watched New Zealand television in all his life be in a position to say what is notable about a long-running New Zealand soap opera. AfDs show a bias for the proximal. Subjects of relative equal value in a far-away country or town are less notable than an equivalent subject near home. There is a bias against the small. It is ironic that people who decry the anti-sharing attitudes of the big recording companies appear to view the bands outside of that organization's grasp as not-notable A few easy to meet criteria should be enough to overthrow accusations of non-notability. There is an anti-corporate bias. (And I say this as an old leftist who is more than ready to criticize corporate misdeeds.) A software producer in India was proposed as non-notable because its 40 branch operations were fewer than the branches of a New Hampshire restaurant chain. I'm sure that there are significant software producers in North America with fewer branch operations. It would help if we were dealing with comparable industries. Basic information about corporations is not about the good or bad deeds of the corporation. It is about general information: ownership patterns, location of headquarters and branches, its industry and products, its share price and dividend history. Such neutral information is often most easily available from the company's own publications, as well as such publications as the Wall Street Journal. It is not the spin and advertisement that a company produces, and a good NPOV editor should be able to sort out those two. Corporate information may be alien to the academic denizens, but it can be very interesting for many people. To begin with, every company listed on a stock exchange is sufficiently notable for inclusion. Those are the first biases that I noted, and I'm sure that I will find others. Ec

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw(a)armory.com> wrote: Absolutely dead-on. If you didn't bother to find your sources, and someone else challenges your material, they can and should remove it if you fail to back it up. Sourcing is a -requirement- once a challenge is made (and presumably we are talking about a scenario in which some form of challenge is made, given that if no challenge is ever made, no justification is ever needed from anyone.) To preempt that, it is best to find sources BEFORE adding material (why would you be adding material without finding it in a reliable source anyway, and why not cite it if you have it?), but if one's material that -was- added without sourcing is challenged, one is responsible to either provide such sources or not obstruct removal until and unless sourcing can be found. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

On 11/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw(a)armory.com> wrote: I agree. All that's required to remove unsourced information is someone disputing it (generally, we tag it and give someone a chance to source it, but I don't believe there is a requirement to do so). To put it back again, you need to find an adequate source. The burden is most definitely on the person wanting to include the disputed content.