On Dec 5, 2006, at 1:20 AM, wikien-l-request@Wikipedia.org wrote:

From: Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net

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On 12/1/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

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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"?

If "ifs" and "ans" were pots and pans we'd have no need of tinkers.

If it happened to an article I cared about and was knowledgeable about, I'd add some sources.

If someone did it rapidly and wholesale to articles in what appeared to be a biased way, I'd call WP:POINT on them.

I don't think 80% of our articles are _utterly_ unsourced, by the way. Let's do a quick reality check. I'm going to hit the "random article" button ten times:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_asynchronous_receiver/transmitter Good example of an utterly unsourced article that shouldn't be deleted http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Moss Good external link to a bio. Badly sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewer% 27s_Dictionary_of_Irish_Phrase_and_Fable Stub article. Does an ISBN number count as a source? I think so, because it can be used to locate further information. Badly sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Dead_and_Dynamite Pop culture article. Three OK external links. Badly sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Markov An athlete. Good external link to "IAAF profile for Dmitri Markov." Badly sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Ferragamo Seven-or-eight-paragraph article on an athlete. Utterly unsourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_McClen An athlete. Are you sure the random article button works? Two good external links. Badly sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusky_Thrush Good print source. Good external link. No inline sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Dash Three OK web "references." One OK external link (Nintendo's official Pokémon Dash game profile). One fansite external link. One inadequately-cited print reference ("Instruction manual for Pokémon Dash"). Weakly sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tiller Controversial abortion doctor. Eleven inline citations to reasonably good news sources.

So, there you have it.

Nothing like "80%" of our articles are unsourced. The vast majority of them might be called feebly sourced (no inline citations, what citations there are are mostly web links.

So, in answer to the hypothetical, if anyone tried to delete the entire article on the basis of its being "unsourced," I'd strongly object in the case of nine of the ten. In the case of the UART article, I believe I could scare up a couple of sources in about ten minutes and that's probably what I'd do.