[WikiEN-l] "Articles that do not cite reliable published sources will be deleted."

[Delirium]

Cheney Shill wrote:

>How does that reduce the scope of the policy?  That's now 3
>sources, 2 policies (V & NPOV) and a guideline, that state
>produce reliable sources or expect the material to be
>deleted.  That's reinforcement, not reduction.
>
>The question is how long should articles without reliable
>sources be allowed to remain.  Should they be allowed to
>linger indefinitely?
>  
>
In practice, yes, if:
1) The information looks likely to be correct; and
2) Even if it isn't, it doesn't matter all that much (not potentially 
libelous, etc.); and
3) It looks likely that a source can be procured in the future.

Sometimes an article that's lingered for months with an unreferenced 
banner will be proposed for deletion, since that's taken as evidence 
against #3.  But there are plenty of things that linger unreferenced, 
even though everyone knows they're basically correct---and you can even 
roughly verify them by doing some google searches---because nobody's 
taken the time to edit them into a properly referenced article.  A bunch 
of stubs of locations and figures of classical antiquity fit this 
description, for example.

I don't really see much harm to leaving them around, or much benefit to 
deleting them in such cases, since they do provide information that with 
some fairly high probability is correct, and in any case provide a good 
base for a future editor to improve the article on.  They should be 
prominently tagged with the "unreferenced" banner, of course, so our 
readers know that they aren't considered good/reliable articles yet.

-Mark