[WikiEN-l] deleting unsourced articles ..... gradually

[Andrew Gray]

On 31/03/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> I did this some time ago for the contents of [[Category:Rapists]] and
> its ilk; unsourced claims were removed, and in the few cases where
> they constituted the entirety of the article, were replaced with a
> prod tag saying "no verifiable assertion of significance is left after
> defamatory unsourced assertions removed, so a contentless article", or
> words to that effect.
>
> I suspect I had about a one in three success rate and a lot of people
> screaming about disruption... and sourcing their articles.

A quick analysis - I prodded 11 articles this way. Two were deleted;
nine survived. Of those, eight are now sourced and one is still
unsourced. The prodded people were entirely those whose notability
depended solely on an unsourced assertion of criminal behaviour. This
doesn't include a half-dozen more sportsmen, etc, where defamatory
unsourced claims were removed and the article still asserted
notability.

I did a swathe of "non-notable criminals" at the same time - people
who had been convicted of some offence or another, ranging from rape
to 'abuse of trust', and were being listed in Wikipedia, The Sex
Offender Registry You Can Edit, albeit with sources. About one in
three of those were deleted, which isn't bad going.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk