On 05/12/06, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net>
wrote:
On
12/1/06, Delirium <delirium(a)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.