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

[Ray Saintonge]

doc wrote:

>Phil Sandifer wrote:
>  
>
>>Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are  
>>reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly  
>>reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or  
>>even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when  
>>they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's  
>>perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely  
>>on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to  
>>make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some  
>>people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
>>
>>And lest anyone think I'm being hysterical here, have a look at  
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ferrero. (Found though random  
>>pages. Took me about 20 to find a good example.) This is a prime  
>>example of the sort of article our sourcing fever doesn't really  
>>think through. It's a stub or barely above a stub. It has more or  
>>less purely factual information, and has a link to the subject's  
>>official site. Anyone who wants to know about Carlos Ferrero is well  
>>served by this article - they get a general overview and a link to  
>>his website. Less useful if you don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing  
>>we'd be hard pressed for comprehensive English-language sources on  
>>him anyway. (We'd get a good number, but most of them would be  
>>incomplete and writing an article out of them would involve a lot of  
>>very messy stitching together.)
>>
>>The article is firmly in the large class of articles that is good  
>>enough to keep up but not good enough to call done. It should not be  
>>speedied, prodded, or deleted through any other means. It should be  
>>edited. If that takes a while, it takes a while, but that's OK  
>>because the article is serving a useful purpose right now. (Heck, I  
>>just learned something from it!)
>>
>>-Phil
>>    
>>
>And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for 
>that..... so it is a poor example.
>
>Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the 
>odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of 
>marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5 
>million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net 
>impact on the project, not one or two cases.
>
>Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.
>
It likely took you a minute to write your last comments.  You could just 
as easily taken the same time to find the second citation yourself.

Ec