[WikiEN-l] Unsourced biographies

[Oldak Quill]

I'm a rampant inclusionist but I completely agree with you in this
case. If an article is wholly unverifiable and/or factually inaccurate
(especially an article as contentious as this), it should be deleted
as soon as possible.

Are there currently any active WikiProjects to monitor these
"dangerous" categories for defamation (particularly defamation of
living people)? If not, I suggest a few of us attempt to set one up.
We cannot tolerate the the use of Wikipedia to injure others
unnecessarily.

On 19/07/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, I've been going through the endless barrel of fun that is
> [[Category:Rapists]], slapping prod tags on the people of no
> encyclopedic significance ("X priest got two years in jail for groping
> some choirboys") and, in a couple of cases, encountering entirely
> unsourced articles. Perhaps the most obvious of these was:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sedley_Alley&oldid=64313689
>
> What ought we to do with them? I mean, policy is aggressively attack
> anything unsourced that would be defamation if it was false; where
> there were other avenues of notability, I've done that.
>
> But in this case, when we remove all forms of the negative material, we get
>
> > Sedley Alley (August 16, 1955 – June 28, 2006) was married to a military person
>
> ...which is in and of itself a candidate for speedy deletion, though I
> suspect doing that would get me brickbatted for nefarious deletionism.
>
> What I've done in the three or four cases where I ran across this was
> put a prod tag on, saying that we simply cannot have any article of
> this form without sources. Better, I feel, to have it deleted than to
> have a dodgy article left up (even if the subject's dead, it's still
> ethically iffy) I've been told this is "impatience"; I'm jumping past
> normal cleanup procedures and slapping a "fix in X days or else"
> warning on.
>
> Thoughts? I'm really not convinced we have another way to deal with
> things like this that actually works...
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
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-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)