[WikiEN-l] the verifiability of articles we already HAVE

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

A fire hydrant which appeared in the background of a picture of me  
published in the local weekly newspaper, which is a published, print  
source and arguably a reliable source.

Before we put too much energy into hairsplitting as to whether this  
fire hydrant is verifiable and therefore encyclopedic, click the  
"random page" article and look at the article we already _have_.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fath_Jang_Mir_Osman_Ali_Khan_Asif_Jah_VII
--a biography with NO references at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renishaw_Hall
--OK assuming we accept the official website and a "gardenvisit"  
website as reliable sources, which I do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardeşen
--A substub with NO references at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Skarsgård
--OK assuming we accept imdb as a reliable source, which I do

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm
--a long, well-written article about a scientific subject that has  
_no_ explicit sources for any items in it. Could subtle vandalism be  
detected in this article by anybody but the contributors of the  
information? There are nine books under "suggested reading" and four  
"see also" web references which probably could source most of the  
information, but there's no way to locate which is the source, for,  
say, the biology section, which is probably somewhat controversial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapleStory
--a long article about an MMORGP with no explicit references for any  
particular facts in it, but a slew of external links to official  
websites and fansites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essequibo_Islands-West_Demerara
--A geography article with NO references at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_A._Evans
--A biography article with a single book listed as reference, but  
apparently one would need to skim through the whole book to find the  
sources for any of the facts in the article.

...and on and on it goes.

Probably less than 5% of Wikipedia's content actually meets [[WP:V]],  
[[WP:CITE]], and [[WP:RS]]. P

robably much less than half of Wikipedia's content meets it even by  
the most charitable interpretation, in which one a) assumes that  
external links to websites run by organizations that are not  
disinterested in their subject matter are reliable sources (I'm  
thinking of things like websites about historic-house museums and the  
like, which are probably mostly sorta-kinda-OK but probably are  
inclined to present the "authorized-biography" view of things), and  
b) assumes that most of the facts in the article could be found in  
the externally linked websites.

Spot-checking, by the way, shows that that is often NOT the case.  
Articles of that kind often start out as, well, paraphrases of  
external website content, then gradually acquire an accumulation of  
interesting things that, I believe, people think they know about the  
topic and add to it, without bothering to add any supporting references.