From: Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca
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.
Such articles _are_ sourced. They're sourced to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
When we source something to _The New York Times_, we don't worry about whether _The New York Times_ cited _its_ sources. The reader knows where the material came from: not from an individual editor's head, but from a specific issue and page of The New York Times. They can make their judgement about its reliability.
When we source something to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the reader knows it cames, not from an individual editor's head, but from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, and they can make their judgement on its reliability.