On 12/5/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Edit screens also tell people to use reliable
sources.
I would equally unforgiving with someone who adds unsourced edits as
someone who starts unsourced articles.
Absolutely. There are some differences though. Article deletion is
much harder to revert. That's probably the biggest one. Also, people
often revert changes to an article which changes it from a massive
unreferenced one to a short factual stub. I used to do that a lot
with articles on VFD, I'd change long articles on people with
absolutely no sources to "Blah Whoever might be a person." and I'd
find that some long time editor would revert me. Maybe that's just a
VFD thing, though. Then there are the other issues, like the fact
that New Page Patrol is possible whereas New Edit Patrol isn't (at
least not without some technical resources). Watchlists are effective
for edits but not as effective for new pages. It's the same
principles, but it's a different beast.
It really depends on how you look at eventualism. The way I see it,
it's fine to remove information as long as its still in the edit
history. If some logged in user wants to actually go through the
trouble of looking up the information and adding it back, that's
great. If not, well, it's still there for someone to find eventually.
But if an article is reduced to a single verifiable sentence (which
would be easy for a new page patroller to do), is it going to get
speedy deleted, and the information lost forever?
If anyone can verify it. Go ahead. But if it can't
be verified, we
shouldn't be leaving it in Wikipedia. It breaks basic policy.
Mgm
Well, there's also the talk page. It's OK to leave most unverified
information there. But that's another difference with new pages. For
some reason most admins insist on deleting the talk page when they
delete an article. I think it's even a speedy criterion.
Anthony