[WikiEN-l] Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information

[Rob]

On 5/16/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of
> random speculative "I heard it somewhere" pseudo information is to be
> tagged with a "needs a cite" tag.  Wrong.  It should be removed,
> aggressively, unless it can be sourced.  This is true of all
> information, but it is particularly true of negative information about
> living persons.

The problem is that POV warriors are starting to adopt this as one of
their tactics.  They are removing information that is easily provable
with a quick google search because it is unsourced, and of course they
refuse to lift a finger to do any work providing references
themselves.  The most egregious example of this I've witnessed is the
removal of the Cheney/Leahy exchange (Dick_cheney#Rebuilding_of_Iraq)
on the grounds that it was temporarily unsourced.  Does anyone
seriously doubt that this happened?  Of course it's simple enough to
counter this edit warring with digging up references, but when edit
warriors are removing entire sections of articles at a time and you're
already working on a dozen articles at once and no one is answering
your RfC request, something is going to get lost in the shuffle and
the accuracy and neutrality of WP will suffer as a result.  I view the
{{fact}} tag as the equivalent of the {{hang on}] tag: don't delete
this until I've gotten a chance to look up the references in a couple
hours/during my lunch break/sometime soon.  Of course they shouldn't
stay unsourced indefinitely, and anything horrifically inflammatory
like the Seigenthaler/JFK claim should be removed immediately, but in
practice it's giving an advantage to the edit warriors.