--- David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 18/09/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2006/9/18, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
If there are NO sources for an article, that
tends to be a sign of
deletability on en:wp. But that is mostly
applied to popular culture
things, where evidence of third-party
verifiability may be needed to
establish that anyone even cares.
Then you have a lot of deletable articles... I
picked random article
20 times. 15 of them did not have references, 4
did (the one skipped
did not have references, but did have a
'bibliography' section, so I
was not sure where to put it).
It's usually applied to new ones. I save the {{unreferenced}} tag for articles with no sources, bibliography, links etc whatsoever.
Your assumption is that anything to do with verifiability *must* be applied pathologically or not at all.
- d.
The problem is that a growing number of people *are* applying this pathologicaly. I don't know the answer to this but it is a real problem. Many people have given up working on articles where these sort of people (who really are well meaning and gracious but also unreasonable) show up and make demands for exacting citations of all asssertions equally.
I have seen the argument that a citation is not a citation per WP:CITE unless it contains page numbers and if no page numbers are given after some amount of time the assertions will be removed per WP:V. Now in this case the assertions (from what I can gather) are not actually believed untrue and have been in the article for over six months (which is why page numbers are hard to come by). In the end I have found a local copy of the book. But I can only find it in the original french so it is not a small effort for me to sastisfy these demands (french is not my best language, not to mention I can not check this book out).
Two of the original people seem to have left the article (one declared they were, the other may have left the project entirely). These demands have forced people to scramble for any sort of citation they can turn up on the internet. I personally believe this article is of worse quality since the citations have begun being adding, because many of the footnotes are misleading or are an incorrect use of primary sources (which are easier to find on the web in this case). I feel I can straighten this case out, now that I have found the book that the information oringinally came from. But how many more places is this happening? I am very alarmed this might become a widespread trend. I have not been sucessful at countering a pathological application of these ideas, and I really did try.
Birgitte SB
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