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

[Fred Bauder]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Steve Bennett [mailto:stevagewp at gmail.com]
>Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 06:15 PM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun
>
>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.

If the information does not have a specific source attached to it such as a page in a book or the equivalent, it is unsourced. You are not obligated to read whole books when no page is given. The priority needs to go to 4) Remove all unsourced harmful or extremely dubious sounding material
>from biographies, and unsourced harmful material from other articles and probably extends to removing such material when that is all that is in the article, even if it is sourced.

Fred