On Feb 1, 2006, at 5:06 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 2/1/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
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".
I thought it didn't need to be described, I assumed it to be commonsense. But perhaps it does need to be spelled out.
If there is an item of any kind that contains unverified potentially libellous statements, it's probably best to delete it and put a note about what you've done on [[WP:AN]]. Someone can look at the history and see if it contains salvageable early revisions. _______________________________________________
This actually does need to be clearly spelled out in some topics.
I tend to edit in modern central African conflicts and I'm pretty sure I've thrown together a couple bio stubs, because I was sick of a redlink, that basically state "So and so is a leader of a militia in eastern Congo and is complicit in the murder, torture and mass rape of civilians" and didn't bother to put a reference in. I've certainly created articles that say "Gen. X oversaw Y war crime" without citing a specific source for that fact. I don't think [[Rwandan Genocide]] has a single citation or in-line reference. Should [[Rwandan Genocide]] be deleted until a sourced version is created, as there are all manner of accusations about people on that page? I certainly don't know for certain that it's all kosher.
I imagine that the state of the Central Africa articles now is about what the U.S. articles were in 2001. The emphasis of most of the regular editors there is on expanding content rather than worrying about citing facts that may be controversial. I sometimes get the feeling reading this list that Wikipedia has reached a uniform level of comprehensive detail on the level of the Pokemon articles, when most of the articles on my watchlist are in a laughable state in comparison to both their real world importance and to other Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia may have reached a point in its biased-for articles that the brakes need to be put on, but I don't see that being particularly helpful to the biased-against topics when they are subject to the same blanket response.
Regards, BanyanTree