[WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/29/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I hope the horse I am beating is still alive: we have to be absolutely
> ruthless about removing "I think I heard it somewhere"
> pseudo-information from Wikipedia, and especially from biographies.

This is a step up from what you have previously requested, namely that
we must be ruthless about removing *harmful* unsourced information
from biographies.

Which of these statements most closely matches what you want us to do:
1) Remove all unsourced[1] material from all articles
2) Remove all unsourced material from all biographies, and unsourced
harmful material from all articles
3) Remove all unsourced harmful or slightly dubious sounding material
from biographies and other articles
4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles
...etc.

If the claim made was not harmful (as I don't believe a fictitious
family member normally is), and was not implausible (I wouldn't have
known), then why would we have removed it? How would we have known?

Steve
[1] I don't even know how we determine if a claim is sourced, short of
tracking down and reading every source mentioned on the page and
looking for it.