[WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

[Bryan Derksen]

Francis Tyers wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 14:16 +0100, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>> If people cited their sources in the first place, there wouldn't be any
>> abuse by people using that fact to get it deleted. Any abuse with these
>> policies can be prevented if people just made the effort. I think I'm going
>> to reread those pages and think about rewriting them.
>>
>> Mgm
> 
> Agree. If there is a problem with things being deleted, it isn't a
> problem with policy, but with the people writing them without specifying
> a source.

This is oversimplified, though. I first started editing Wikipedia back
in mid 2001 and for a long time there was no "standard" approach to
citing sources, or any formal guideline suggesting that everything had
to be cited (as far as I can recall it was enough that things could be
verified in principle). Whenever I made major additions to an article
I'd try to remember to cite the source in the edit summary, or if the
source had more information in it than could be put into the article
itself I'd add an external link at the bottom ("external links" and
"references" are still often blended together willy-nilly to this day,
which can result in references getting removed because external link
standards get applied to them instead), but that was just me and I
wasn't rigorous about it. There's a lot of perfectly good content out
there on Wikipedia that lacks references for legacy reasons. There is
also a lot of stuff that doesn't get cited nowadays because the editors
that added them consider them too trivial or too obvious to be worth
citing, and a good case can be made that there's nothing wrong with
doing this. It's not perfect, but "not perfect" can still be better than
"bad".

Personally, I'm hoping for the day when version flagging arrives to
transport us all to a utopia where Eventualist, Immediatist, Deletionist
and Inclusionist can all see only their own preferred aspect of
Wikipedia and work together in harmony. :)