From: Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com
But on the other hand, the "enforcement" of the policy has been getting so zealous lately that I don't have too much trouble imagining editor A saying "the sky is blue" and editor B demanding a verifiable citation lest the assertion be deleted as original research.
It "ought" to be the case that "obvious" facts, which "everybody knows", can be inserted without explicit citation.
Obviously "the sky is blue" should not be deleted. But it's a rather bad example for your purpose, as I recently noted on a talk page.
In the first place, the sky is "not" always blue, and therefore this is a "fact" that is not really quite true. In the second place, as is so often the case of things that "can't be sourced because they're just common knowledge," it is ''very'' easily sourced:
"the blue sky is so commonplace that it is taken for granted" {{cite book|title=A Field Guide to the Atmosphere|first=Vincent J.| last=Schaefer|coauthors=John A. Day|year=1998|publisher=Houghton Mifflin Field Guides|id=ISBN 0395976316}}
I also found:
The poet [[Robert Service]] says "while the blue sky bends above/ You've got nearly all that matters;" songwriter [[Irving Berlin]] wrote of "[[Blue Skies (song)|Blue Skies]] smiling at me," airmen fly into the [[The U.S. Air Force (song)|wild blue yonder]].
{{cite book|title=Collected Poems of Robert Service|first=Robert| last=Service|year=1940|publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons|id=ISBN 0-399-15015-3}},</ref>
For the sky _not_ always being blue: Matthew 16:2, Jesus says to the Pharisees "When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red."
"At twilight, salmon reds, oranges, purples, white-yellows, and many shades of blue can be seen."
{{cite book|title=Light and Colour in the Outdoors|first=M. G. J.| last=Minnaert|origyear=1974|year=1993|publisher=Springer-Verlag| id=ISBN 0-387-97935-2}} p. 295
And songwriter [[Oscar Hammerstein II|Oscar Hammerstein]]'s famously wrote of "when the sky is a bright canary yellow."<ref>{{cite book| title=American Musical|first=Marc|last=Bauch|publisher=Tectum Verlag| id=ISBN 382888458X}} </ref>
It took me less than ten minutes to turn up the "serious" sources (Schaeffer and Minnaert) another fifteen to find the rest. If something is really a commonly known fact, it is just not that hard to source. And the effort to do so _often_ yields dividends.
This is not to say that requests for citations can't be abused. But, if I am an editor, and I inserted something without a source because I didn't really think it needed one, and someone marked it "citation needed," my response would be to source it. This has happened to me, and it's what I've done. Except in one case... where I couldn't find one... and so I removed the item myself.
Daniel P.B. Smith wrote:
From: Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com But on the other hand, the "enforcement" of the policy has been getting so zealous lately that I don't have too much trouble imagining editor A saying "the sky is blue" and editor B demanding a verifiable citation lest the assertion be deleted as original research.
It "ought" to be the case that "obvious" facts, which "everybody knows", can be inserted without explicit citation.
Obviously "the sky is blue" should not be deleted. But it's a rather bad example for your purpose, as I recently noted on a talk page.
In the first place, the sky is "not" always blue, and therefore...
You're not in training to be a wikilawyer, are you? :-)
This is not to say that requests for citations can't be abused. But, if I am an editor, and I inserted something without a source because I didn't really think it needed one, and someone marked it "citation needed," ...
Don't get me wrong; the policy I'd like to (and tend to) follow is simply that you can post "obvious", uncited information as long as you can get away with it. No one will quibble with the "obvious, everybody knows 'em" facts, and we're all happy.
But that works only as long as there aren't too many people running around unreasonably slapping "citation needed" on things. (Which is the point you already made when you said "This is not to say that requests for citations can't be abused.") There are actually two subcases of this problem: (1) requests for citation of contentious content coupled with highhanded rejection of proffered sources as "unreliable" leading to the abuse of WP:V as a censorship tool (i.e. the problem Stevertigo started the "CITE nazis" thread by asking about), and (2) people dogmatically insisting on references for "sky is blue" facts which every reasonable editor thought was obvious, which although, you're right, they usually can be sourced easily enough, eventually leads to articles which are so heavily slathered with footnotes and other references that they're cumbersome to read and just *ugly*. (As a friend was commenting about a featured article a little while ago, "I suppose this is what all featured articles are going to look like from now on -- littered with a welter of footnote marks. This is getting ridiculous.")
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
From: Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com
But on the other hand, the "enforcement" of the policy has been getting so zealous lately that I don't have too much trouble imagining editor A saying "the sky is blue" and editor B demanding a verifiable citation lest the assertion be deleted as original research.
It "ought" to be the case that "obvious" facts, which "everybody knows", can be inserted without explicit citation.
Obviously "the sky is blue" should not be deleted. But it's a rather bad example for your purpose, as I recently noted on a talk page.
In the first place, the sky is "not" always blue, and therefore this is a "fact" that is not really quite true. In the second place, as is so often the case of things that "can't be sourced because they're just common knowledge," it is ''very'' easily sourced:
"the blue sky is so commonplace that it is taken for granted" {{cite book|title=A Field Guide to the Atmosphere|first=Vincent J.| last=Schaefer|coauthors=John A. Day|year=1998|publisher=Houghton Mifflin Field Guides|id=ISBN 0395976316}}
I also found:
The poet [[Robert Service]] says "while the blue sky bends above/ You've got nearly all that matters;" songwriter [[Irving Berlin]] wrote of "[[Blue Skies (song)|Blue Skies]] smiling at me," airmen fly into the [[The U.S. Air Force (song)|wild blue yonder]].
{{cite book|title=Collected Poems of Robert Service|first=Robert| last=Service|year=1940|publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons|id=ISBN 0-399-15015-3}},</ref>
For the sky _not_ always being blue: Matthew 16:2, Jesus says to the Pharisees "When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red."
"At twilight, salmon reds, oranges, purples, white-yellows, and many shades of blue can be seen."
{{cite book|title=Light and Colour in the Outdoors|first=M. G. J.| last=Minnaert|origyear=1974|year=1993|publisher=Springer-Verlag| id=ISBN 0-387-97935-2}} p. 295
And songwriter [[Oscar Hammerstein II|Oscar Hammerstein]]'s famously wrote of "when the sky is a bright canary yellow."<ref>{{cite book| title=American Musical|first=Marc|last=Bauch|publisher=Tectum Verlag| id=ISBN 382888458X}} </ref>
It took me less than ten minutes to turn up the "serious" sources (Schaeffer and Minnaert) another fifteen to find the rest. If something is really a commonly known fact, it is just not that hard to source. And the effort to do so _often_ yields dividends.
This is not to say that requests for citations can't be abused. But, if I am an editor, and I inserted something without a source because I didn't really think it needed one, and someone marked it "citation needed," my response would be to source it. This has happened to me, and it's what I've done. Except in one case... where I couldn't find one... and so I removed the item myself.
If we have an article on missing the point compleetly in a discussion. I propose we include this email under the subheadingin the article:
==Too clever to get the point==
Dalf