Andrew Gray wrote:
On 18/07/07, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
If an article has trivial flaws (such as lack of sources), correcting is much easier, faster, and productive than involving any kind of process.
Well, if you can tell me how I can "easily and quickly" source an article which appears likely to rely on Australian newspaper articles from the 1980s, then sure.
Not everything is on the internet. Not everything is clear-cut and comprehensible. Not everything can be resolved by a nonspecialist. Saying "if you don't find sources yourself you shouldn't ask for them" is just symptomatic of this obsession we have with google as the source to all our dilemmas.
Any situation where the sourcing is so obvious as to be "trivial" to solve, it's not going to be appropriate to mark it for deletion. This is patently obvious. It's the more dubious cases that are the problem
- and they do exist.
I don't think that we are fundamentally disagreeing.
Sure, not everything is on the internet, but at least some things are. The sources that one might find by googling may be rudimentary, but that may be sufficient to establish that the topic was not manufactured from whole cloth.
The failure of some to look for obvious sourcing is more frustrating than the dubious cases that you mention. The problems that accompany the dubious cases are of a different nature than simple existence problems.
Ec