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

[Tony Sidaway]

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

Yes, crap usually dies an easy death.  Wikipedia is working when that
happens, just as much as when good articles prevail or salvageable
ones survive.