[WikiEN-l] The new verifiability policy

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/1/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> But drive-by edits are not policy, and are never going to be policy, in
> contentious matters.  It is completely sound policy that edits which cannot,
> in the medium term, be supported by good sources cannot stand on the page.
> My concern, and I see it too often, is that material is cut because it is
> unsourced, and only because of that.

I agree. I am somewhat staggered that with the number of times that
terms like "verifiability" and "no original research" are bandied
about, we can not as a community agree on two simple matters:

1. Should we remove material which would be perfectly acceptable in
Wikipedia if only the (presumed existing) source was actually cited?
2. Should we remove material which presents verifiable facts simply
because those facts have not been published by another source?

In the first case, I'm talking about removing common knowledge or
non-contentious material which no one is actually disputing. In the
second, I'm talking about removing information like content of
computer games, movies, or websites, where sufficient information can
be given to make it verifiable, but for which no secondary source
exists.

These are pretty fundamental questions, but I've only seen a small
amount of discusson on them (and lots of disagreement about other
issues which arises from unstated differences of opinion on these
issues).

I would love to hear some discusson on this.

> The fact that proper efforts to get consensus versions of page cannot be so
> tightly defined - where's the acronym? - does not mean that the policy that
> we edit collectively is trumped.  We need to take care on this.  The
> 'instrumentalist' view, that policy is to be used to rule one's own edits
> in, and the edits of others out, is a menace, in fact.

Yes. The old versions of the verifiability policy were extremely
enlightening. Especially the "Help people out, don't make other
editors try and find a source for you" line of thinking. Whereas now
it's more like, "cite a source, or else someone else will delete your
work".

Steve