[WikiEN-l] Unsourced biographies

[Anthony]

On 7/19/06, 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.
>
Um, did you try to find sources, or did you just remove stuff that
didn't already have a source listed?  What was your source for his
death date?  Because it didn't take me more than a few seconds to find
tons of sources on this person.

By the way, it's not possible to defame dead people, is it?

Anthony