[WikiEN-l] Proposed {{prod}} for articles with no sources

[John Lee]

On 7/18/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> > There are at least two librarians posting to this list, and both have
> > supported cautious and informed views about handling these issues.
>
> I'm a third one, and for what it's worth I support the use of "cite
> this *now* or it dies a flaming flaming death" in appropriate cases.
> [[Demographics of Latvia]] is not an appropriate case. [[Notorious
> rapists]] is!
>
> There are some articles that basically consist of nasty claims, yet
> have no sources. If we remove all the unsourced and potentially
> defamatory claims, we get "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian" rather
> than "Joe Smith (b. 1964) is a Canadian criminal best known for
> molesting several young moose over a seven-year period in 1992", and
> at that point the article is pretty much worth quietly losing.
>
> So I take out the claims, slap a prod tag on it, and let it be. To my
> delight, this has been mostly successful - only two or three got
> reverted with whiny edit summaries, and one of them got taken to AFD
> and deleted anyway (on the grounds that we really, really aren't a sex
> offenders registry). I strongly feel the encyclopedia was
> substantially better for doing this, and isn't that the point?


Absolutely. What I'm afraid of is that this process/PROD will end up being
used on articles like [[Demographics of Latvia]] simply because there are
far too many idiot gold farmers out there.

Johnleemk