Thomas Dalton wrote:
What if the material is accurate and can be checked with a quick google search?
The burden of proof is always on the person adding the information.
"Source" does not mean "somewhere which can be used to verify the information", it means "the place where the information came from". Only the person that added the information actually knows the source, so they should be the one citing sources. The whole idea of adding sources to existing articles is completely backward. We need to work on getting people to actually *use* reliable sources, not just cite them. If people were actually using the sources then they could cite them as they went along with almost no additional work.
This seems pretty at odds with the way Wikipedia writes articles. Yes, the original author *ought* to reference his or her article when written. He or she also *ought* to write it in good English, with a nice introduction, include relevant facts without undue weighting, and so on. However often many of these things aren't done, or are done imperfectly, so later editors fix them. As long as the article is referenced to material that can corroborate its content, I don't see why it makes a different whether they're the same references the original author used. The point of references is to corroborate the content, not as some sort of metaphysical trail of editing. If someone was born in 1855, and we have a reference stating they were born in 1855, what does it matter whether it's the *same* reference the original author of the article got the date out of?
-Mark