It can be, yes. But as in the Siegenthaler incident, there are cases where there is an unsourced negative claim that anyone could easily spot and remove. You don't need to be an expert in anything to know that claiming someone was briefly suspected of an involvement in the Kennedy assassinations requires a source and should be instantly removed if there is no source.
Right, but this wasn't a "potentially libelous" or negative article, I assume? If it says "Such and such is a journalist in India, he worked here, he worked there" then fine, tag it {{POV-check}} and ask for sources. If it says "Such and such is a NeoNazi activist..." or "Such-and-such was convicted of rape..." then if there is no source, blank it!
--Jimbo
It strikes me that you are giving directives which are not spelt out in [[WP:V]] (or would it be [[WP:BLP]]. They sound very reasonable, but perhaps this new policy of "delete all unsourced potentially libellous material no matter what" should be made more public.
Yes, it is described in many places that potentially libellous material does not belong. But there is a difference between "it doesn't belong" and "actively look for it and destroy it unless it has rock solid references".
From an earlier post: Totally! What you do in such a case is give the article an aura of having been checked or written by real Wikipedians, when it's still the same crap some anon stuck in there in the first place.
This is another argument for having proper quality tags/stable versions/verified versions. There are many people who make formatting changes to articles without reading them, such as the various wikiprojects for punctuation etc. I don't think we should discourage them. The software should simply make a clearer distinction between "X looked at this article, thought it was ok, and added a full stop" and "X simply added a full stop".
Hell, even a couple of extra edit summary tags would help. We have "minor edit", why not "proofread", "checked sources" or "checked for unsourced libellous material"?
Steve
On 2/1/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it is described in many places that potentially libellous material does not belong. But there is a difference between "it doesn't belong" and "actively look for it and destroy it unless it has rock solid references".
I thought it didn't need to be described, I assumed it to be commonsense. But perhaps it does need to be spelled out.
If there is an item of any kind that contains unverified potentially libellous statements, it's probably best to delete it and put a note about what you've done on [[WP:AN]]. Someone can look at the history and see if it contains salvageable early revisions.
On Feb 1, 2006, at 5:06 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 2/1/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it is described in many places that potentially libellous material does not belong. But there is a difference between "it doesn't belong" and "actively look for it and destroy it unless it has rock solid references".
I thought it didn't need to be described, I assumed it to be commonsense. But perhaps it does need to be spelled out.
If there is an item of any kind that contains unverified potentially libellous statements, it's probably best to delete it and put a note about what you've done on [[WP:AN]]. Someone can look at the history and see if it contains salvageable early revisions. _______________________________________________
This actually does need to be clearly spelled out in some topics.
I tend to edit in modern central African conflicts and I'm pretty sure I've thrown together a couple bio stubs, because I was sick of a redlink, that basically state "So and so is a leader of a militia in eastern Congo and is complicit in the murder, torture and mass rape of civilians" and didn't bother to put a reference in. I've certainly created articles that say "Gen. X oversaw Y war crime" without citing a specific source for that fact. I don't think [[Rwandan Genocide]] has a single citation or in-line reference. Should [[Rwandan Genocide]] be deleted until a sourced version is created, as there are all manner of accusations about people on that page? I certainly don't know for certain that it's all kosher.
I imagine that the state of the Central Africa articles now is about what the U.S. articles were in 2001. The emphasis of most of the regular editors there is on expanding content rather than worrying about citing facts that may be controversial. I sometimes get the feeling reading this list that Wikipedia has reached a uniform level of comprehensive detail on the level of the Pokemon articles, when most of the articles on my watchlist are in a laughable state in comparison to both their real world importance and to other Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia may have reached a point in its biased-for articles that the brakes need to be put on, but I don't see that being particularly helpful to the biased-against topics when they are subject to the same blanket response.
Regards, BanyanTree
You raise good questions. I have no answers.
Steve
On 2/3/06, BanyanTree banyantreewp@gmail.com wrote:
This actually does need to be clearly spelled out in some topics.
I tend to edit in modern central African conflicts and I'm pretty sure I've thrown together a couple bio stubs, because I was sick of a redlink, that basically state "So and so is a leader of a militia in eastern Congo and is complicit in the murder, torture and mass rape of civilians" and didn't bother to put a reference in. I've certainly created articles that say "Gen. X oversaw Y war crime" without citing a specific source for that fact. I don't think [[Rwandan Genocide]] has a single citation or in-line reference. Should [[Rwandan Genocide]] be deleted until a sourced version is created, as there are all manner of accusations about people on that page? I certainly don't know for certain that it's all kosher.
I imagine that the state of the Central Africa articles now is about what the U.S. articles were in 2001. The emphasis of most of the regular editors there is on expanding content rather than worrying about citing facts that may be controversial. I sometimes get the feeling reading this list that Wikipedia has reached a uniform level of comprehensive detail on the level of the Pokemon articles, when most of the articles on my watchlist are in a laughable state in comparison to both their real world importance and to other Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia may have reached a point in its biased-for articles that the brakes need to be put on, but I don't see that being particularly helpful to the biased-against topics when they are subject to the same blanket response.