From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com
I don't think deleting accurate, high-quality, unreferenced material is in Wikipedia's best interests. Asking for a source, yes. Adding sources, yes. But *deleting* good material? No.
Unsourced material is not high-quality material.
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com
I don't think deleting accurate, high-quality, unreferenced material is in Wikipedia's best interests. Asking for a source, yes. Adding sources, yes. But *deleting* good material? No.
Unsourced material is not high-quality material.
It can be, depending on the circumstances. This isn't something on which categorical statements can be made (or at least one can't expect anything close to consensus on such statements). For example, consider the articles where we imported masses of unreferenced material from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. That's not even high quality stuff by today's standards but it's served as a good foundation for further work.
On 11/30/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
From: "Steve Bennett" stevagewp@gmail.com
I don't think deleting accurate, high-quality, unreferenced material is in Wikipedia's best interests. Asking for a source, yes. Adding sources, yes. But *deleting* good material? No.
Unsourced material is not high-quality material.
I'll interpret that as "Uncited material can by definition never be considered 'high-quality material'."
And then I'll strongly disagree. Newspapers, encyclopaedias and many other sources of high-quality information regularly do not cite their sources. If we take one of our best featured articles and remove the references section, it is still much better than a shorter article that does cite its sources. And streets ahead of an article which false cites its sources...
Don't get me wrong, citing sources is good - but for us, its primary use is a defence against nonsense and worse. The sources are a means to quality, not a form of quality themselves.
Steve