From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com On 11/30/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
What I meant is that _in Wikipedia,_ uncited material is not high- quality material.
What do you mean by "high quality"?
Well, according to the verifiability policy, content is _not supposed to go into Wikipedia at all_ unless it's sourced.
I'd say that content that isn't supposed to be in Wikipedia at all can hardly be considered to be "high quality" _for Wikipedia_.
That's going to be my last reply, as it seems to me that basically you do not agree with the verifiability policy.
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com On 11/30/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
What I meant is that _in Wikipedia,_ uncited material is not high- quality material.
What do you mean by "high quality"?
Well, according to the verifiability policy, content is _not supposed to go into Wikipedia at all_ unless it's sourced.
I'd say that content that isn't supposed to be in Wikipedia at all can hardly be considered to be "high quality" _for Wikipedia_.
That's going to be my last reply, as it seems to me that basically you do not agree with the verifiability policy.
The verifiability policy has never been a hardline policy, but a guideline and something to aim towards. When it was first adopted, nobody thought it meant that we should summarily delete the 80%+ of the encyclopedia that at the time was unsourced. Instead what it meant was that we should begin going through and adding sources to it.
In general some amount of common sense is required. Claims that are almost certainly true but uncited should be left in and have a citation supplied---this is what the {{fact}} tag is for. Claims that are surprising or unlikely should be removed or moved to the talk page, pending some verification that they actually are true. Claims that are negative claims about a living individual should be treated in the second manner by default. We wouldn't have a living-persons policy, a {{fact}} template, or any number of other such things if our verifiability policy were that all unsourced statements should be summarily deleted.
-Mark
On 12/1/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
The verifiability policy has never been a hardline policy, but a guideline and something to aim towards. When it was first adopted, nobody thought it meant that we should summarily delete the 80%+ of the encyclopedia that at the time was unsourced. Instead what it meant was that we should begin going through and adding sources to it.
In general some amount of common sense is required. Claims that are almost certainly true but uncited should be left in and have a citation supplied---this is what the {{fact}} tag is for. Claims that are surprising or unlikely should be removed or moved to the talk page, pending some verification that they actually are true. Claims that are negative claims about a living individual should be treated in the second manner by default. We wouldn't have a living-persons policy, a {{fact}} template, or any number of other such things if our verifiability policy were that all unsourced statements should be summarily deleted.
What is the advantage of having a policy that says "You must do X", then interpreting it as "Actually you only have to do X in some situations"? Wouldn't it be more helpful for everyone, especially including newcomes, to have a policy that says "Do X in the following situations"?
A policy that no one really follows is bad news.
Steve
On 12/1/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
The verifiability policy has never been a hardline policy, but a guideline and something to aim towards. When it was first adopted, nobody thought it meant that we should summarily delete the 80%+ of the encyclopedia that at the time was unsourced. Instead what it meant was that we should begin going through and adding sources to it.
What if a person picks a random article from the 80% of the encyclopedia that isn't sourced and says "I'm going to delete this unless someone else sources it"?
On 05/12/06, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On 12/1/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
The verifiability policy has never been a hardline policy, but a guideline and something to aim towards. When it was first adopted, nobody thought it meant that we should summarily delete the 80%+ of the encyclopedia that at the time was unsourced. Instead what it meant was that we should begin going through and adding sources to it.
What if a person picks a random article from the 80% of the encyclopedia that isn't sourced and says "I'm going to delete this unless someone else sources it"?
In my experience, wailing and gnashing of teeth, even when the motive was a relatively uncontentious one (as opposed to "OMG CRUFT hey look it's unsourced DELETE"...)
A while back, I went through every single article in [[Category:Rapists]] and its subcategories, weeding out the less-notable "he's a sex offender therefore we need an article on him" cases and trying to get rid of the unsourced or flimsily-sourced ones.
Unfortunately, when you have an article saying "so-and-so is a rapist", and you cut out all the defamatory-if-untrue material, you end up with "John Smith (b. 1941) is an American. {{unsourced}}". So how to deal with these?
I slapped prod on them.
{{subst:prod|This article doesn't contain any sources and is fundamentally defamatory if untrue; if these claims are removed we have a meaningless or contentless article which doesn't assert any notability. If it can't be sourced it should be deleted; so if it isn't fixed in five days it will be}} (or words to that effect).
I got told I was being disruptive for "not going through normal processes" because things "didn't work fast enough" for me, and I should have been using {{fact}} like everyone else. Ho hum.
I still recommend the method for "passively bad" articles - it's as effective as it gets, assuming one outraged person doesn't go through your contribs removing all the prod tags because they're upset. AFD has a tendency to say "keep and cleanup" and then you just have the same problem sitting there.
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 05/12/06, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On 12/1/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
The verifiability policy has never been a hardline policy, but a guideline and something to aim towards. When it was first adopted, nobody thought it meant that we should summarily delete the 80%+ of the encyclopedia that at the time was unsourced. Instead what it meant was that we should begin going through and adding sources to it.
What if a person picks a random article from the 80% of the encyclopedia that isn't sourced and says "I'm going to delete this unless someone else sources it"?
In my experience, wailing and gnashing of teeth, even when the motive was a relatively uncontentious one (as opposed to "OMG CRUFT hey look it's unsourced DELETE"...)
A while back, I went through every single article in [[Category:Rapists]] and its subcategories, weeding out the less-notable "he's a sex offender therefore we need an article on him" cases and trying to get rid of the unsourced or flimsily-sourced ones.
Unfortunately, when you have an article saying "so-and-so is a rapist", and you cut out all the defamatory-if-untrue material, you end up with "John Smith (b. 1941) is an American. {{unsourced}}". So how to deal with these?
I slapped prod on them.
{{subst:prod|This article doesn't contain any sources and is fundamentally defamatory if untrue; if these claims are removed we have a meaningless or contentless article which doesn't assert any notability. If it can't be sourced it should be deleted; so if it isn't fixed in five days it will be}} (or words to that effect).
I got told I was being disruptive for "not going through normal processes" because things "didn't work fast enough" for me, and I should have been using {{fact}} like everyone else. Ho hum.
I still recommend the method for "passively bad" articles - it's as effective as it gets, assuming one outraged person doesn't go through your contribs removing all the prod tags because they're upset. AFD has a tendency to say "keep and cleanup" and then you just have the same problem sitting there.
Excellent solution, may I borrow your prod content for my own use? -kc-
On 05/12/06, Puppy puppy@killerchihuahua.com wrote:
{{subst:prod|This article doesn't contain any sources and is fundamentally defamatory if untrue; if these claims are removed we have a meaningless or contentless article which doesn't assert any notability. If it can't be sourced it should be deleted; so if it isn't fixed in five days it will be}} (or words to that effect).
Excellent solution, may I borrow your prod content for my own use?
Lay on, MacDuff. You may want to add a couple of wikilinks in it to relevant policy pages, and be prepared to argue the toss when people come complaining...
Oh! Random query. Is it possible for someone to come up with a list of articles which are in any of the "Living people", "XXX births" and/or "XXX deaths" categories, but no other categories? IE, people tagged solely as people and nothing else.
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 05/12/06, Puppy puppy@killerchihuahua.com wrote:
{{subst:prod|This article doesn't contain any sources and is fundamentally defamatory if untrue; if these claims are removed we have a meaningless or contentless article which doesn't assert any notability. If it can't be sourced it should be deleted; so if it isn't fixed in five days it will be}} (or words to that effect).
Excellent solution, may I borrow your prod content for my own use?
Lay on, MacDuff. You may want to add a couple of wikilinks in it to relevant policy pages, and be prepared to argue the toss when people come complaining...
Oh! Random query. Is it possible for someone to come up with a list of articles which are in any of the "Living people", "XXX births" and/or "XXX deaths" categories, but no other categories? IE, people tagged solely as people and nothing else.
That would be easy to do with database access by writing a simple query. Not having any, I could dump the info into a spreadsheet and check manually... which would be a real pain, so I'm not actually volunteering although it is a possibility. I know database dumps are available, but that's all I know about them - perhaps someone could point me to information concerning that? -kc-
On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Puppy wrote:
Excellent solution, may I borrow your prod content for my own use?
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."
On 12/1/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
Well, according to the verifiability policy, content is _not supposed to go into Wikipedia at all_ unless it's sourced.
I'd say that content that isn't supposed to be in Wikipedia at all can hardly be considered to be "high quality" _for Wikipedia_.
That's going to be my last reply, as it seems to me that basically you do not agree with the verifiability policy.
I don't think anyone actually follows the policy (in its strict interpretation), so I'm not alone. I do believe we should have a workable policy, and what I'm advocating comes pretty close to what is actually followed in practice: harmful material must be verifiable, otherwise warn readers about unverifiable material.
Jimmy Wales has repeatedly insisted that we should enforce the verifiability policy more strictly. However, he generally does that in response to "harmful" type material, and his calls haven't had much effect so far. I would just like us to get to a situation where we have a workable, sensible policy that everyone follows.
Steve