[WikiEN-l] The deletion paradox

[Steve Bennett]

> It can be, yes.  But as in the Siegenthaler incident, there
> are cases where there is an unsourced negative claim that
> anyone could easily spot and remove.  You don't need to be an
> expert in anything to know that claiming someone was briefly
> suspected of an involvement in the Kennedy assassinations
> requires a source and should be instantly removed if there is
> no source.

> Right, but this wasn't a "potentially libelous" or negative
> article, I assume?  If it says "Such and such is a journalist
> in India, he worked here, he worked there" then fine, tag it
> {{POV-check}} and ask for sources.  If it says "Such and such
> is a NeoNazi activist..." or "Such-and-such was convicted of
> rape..." then if there is no source, blank it!
>
> --Jimbo

It strikes me that you are giving directives which are not spelt out
in [[WP:V]] (or would it be [[WP:BLP]]. They sound very reasonable,
but perhaps this new policy of "delete all unsourced potentially
libellous material no matter what" should be made more public.

Yes, it is described in many places that potentially libellous
material does not belong. But there is a difference between "it
doesn't belong" and "actively look for it and destroy it unless it has
rock solid references".

>From an earlier post:
>Totally!  What you do in such a case is give the article an aura of
>having been checked or written by real Wikipedians, when it's still the
>same crap some anon stuck in there in the first place.

This is another argument for having proper quality tags/stable
versions/verified versions. There are many people who make formatting
changes to articles without reading them, such as the various
wikiprojects for punctuation etc. I don't think we should discourage
them. The software should simply make a clearer distinction between "X
looked at this article, thought it was ok, and added a full stop" and
"X simply added a full stop".

Hell, even a couple of extra edit summary tags would help. We have
"minor edit", why not "proofread", "checked sources" or "checked for
unsourced libellous material"?

Steve