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

[Bryan Derksen]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I edited out the bad bit, but I left in the previous line:
> 
> "Ellen Fanning is married and has two young sons."
> 
> There is no source.  Is it even true?  Well, I asked her, and it is 
> true.  But there is no source.
> 
> 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.

But even you, even now in this very instance you're using as an example
of what you think should be done, _didn't_ ruthlessly remove the
unsourced information. If you really believe that we have to be
absolutely ruthless about removing all unsourced information why did you
deliberately leave the married-with-two-young-sons thing in?

I think the reason is that our one truly fundamental goal is to write a
good, free encyclopedia, and that while attempting to source everything
is a good means to that goal if we were to take it to the extreme it
would actually start to move us farther away from it. If we were to
actually follow through with the absolute full extent of the
only-sourced-statements ideal it would devastate Wikipedia's current
contents and IMO raise such a barrier to editing that new work would
slow to a crawl. We have to consider these costs and find a compromise
position that tries to minimize them.