On 3/1/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@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