[WikiEN-l] CITE nazis

[Steve Summit]

Stevertigo wrote:
> Im not exactly the most citatious Wikipedian, but nor do I have any 
> tendency to make claims which arent easily verifiable. Over the years 
> though Ive encountered a number of Wikipedians (I wont name names) who 
> abuse or violate a clean interpretation of CIVIL by referring to CITE 
> or V as a basis for what is essentially ownership of an article...

It's a thorny question.  On the one hand our verifiability policy
is super important and keeps getting more so; it's one of our few
functioning bulwarks against the ever-rising tides of cruft and
nonsense.  But on the other hand, the "enforcement" of the policy
has been getting so zealous lately that I don't have too much
trouble imagining editor A saying "the sky is blue" and editor B
demanding a verifiable citation lest the assertion be deleted as
original research.

It "ought" to be the case that "obvious" facts, which "everybody
knows", can be inserted without explicit citation.  To exhaustively,
regimentedly cite every well-known fact in every article would be
ugly, unwieldy, and overbearing.  But it's equally obvious that,
the bigger and more popular Wikipedia gets, the harder it is to
rely on "obvious" or "ought to" rules which depend on people being
reasonable.