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

[Birgitte SB]

--- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 18/09/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 2006/9/18, David Gerard <dgerard at 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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