Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/19/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
If you see an unsourced statement that would be libel if false, and it makes you feel suspicious enough to want to tag it as {{citation needed}}, please do not do that! Please just remove the statement and ask a question on the talk page.
Agree with this. Is it added to the relevant policy pages?
Here is an example from an article I deleted:
"The most recent disaster that <name omitted> claims his organization has responded to is the 2004 South Asia Tsunami, although there is no convincing evidence that he or any of his team has been there.[citation needed]"
That is really really really awful.
It's also just stupid, bad writing. "Nobel peace prize winner Jim Smith said all people should donate money to charities. Ironically, Smith has never given money to the [insert name of charity picked at random here."
The real problem with the last statement is that it is a negative one. Saying that someone has _never_ done something is virtually impossible to verify. (Unless he was out of contact with everyone when his Oceanic Airlines flight home from the Nobel ceremonies crashed on a South Pacific Island)
IMHO this kind of writing breaches NPOV and almost NOR - we start to make claims about the person by connecting unrelated facts together. We should never attempt to expose hypocrisy in our subjects - if it exists, we should find reliable sources that have already done that. This was the problem with [[Safe Speed]] - editors had tried to debunk claims made by the group, whereas what they should have been doing was citing others who had debunked them, not just general research that apparently contradicts their claims.
It's still a matter of how you expose the hypocrisy. In the case of the Massachusetts congressman who openly campaigned for a maximum of four terms, it was a verifiable fact that he was in his seventh term.
Selective juxtaposition of facts to imply something is definitely out. You either say it and cite a source, or you don't say it at all.
Yes, but a skillfull wordsmith can still find ways around that.
Ec