[Foundation-l] Verifiability: Constitution? Question for Jimbo!

[David Gerard]

On 18/09/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is a difference between a need for being hard-arsed and being
> hard-arsed. As there are many people considering the lack of sources as a
> reason for immediate deletion, I would say we are way over the top already.


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.

In the case of the street layouts ... it's possible Wikipedia isn't
the place for this unless and until there's a third-party source to
verify it. And, you know, there are websites other than Wikipedia in
the world to write up this stuff in the *first* instance.


> I also am of the opinion that it will do little good but to drive away many
> people who have something to add.


It's a balancing act between not discouraging the newbies and dealing
with the firehose of complete crap that hits en:wp every day. (The
numbers as of Nov 2005 were around 4000 new articles/day, over 2000 of
which were killed within 24 hours; we've become really stupidly
popular since then, I don't know what the current numbers are.)

But deletion policy on en: has been problematic and deeply antisocial
in its construction for a long time.


- d.