[WikiEN-l] deleting unsourced articles ..... gradually

[doc]

Phil Sandifer wrote:
> 
> On Mar 31, 2007, at 6:58 AM, doc wrote:
> 
>> 2) Any biography *totally* lacking sources (other than the  
>> subject's own
>> pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days.
>>
>> 2b) Any page on an organisation or corporation lacking sources (other
>> than the subject's own pages) may be tagged as such and deleted  
>> after 7
>> days.
>> 3) Any article *totally* lacking sources (other than the subjects own
>> pages) may be tagged as such and deleted after 7 days
>>
> 
> Gah. #1 was sensible. #2-3 are terrible. People's own sites are  
> reliable sources for information about them. It's perfectly  
> reasonable to use a person or company's own site as the primary or  
> even sole source for a stub or relatively short article. Yes, when  
> they get to good and featured length they'll need more, but it's  
> perfectly possible to have an embryonic article that relies entirely  
> on the subject's own pages. The sole useful effect of #2 and #3 is to  
> make it possible to do incontestable deletions of articles that some  
> people have notability problems with. Absolutely not.
> 
> And lest anyone think I'm being hysterical here, have a look at  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ferrero. (Found though random  
> pages. Took me about 20 to find a good example.) This is a prime  
> example of the sort of article our sourcing fever doesn't really  
> think through. It's a stub or barely above a stub. It has more or  
> less purely factual information, and has a link to the subject's  
> official site. Anyone who wants to know about Carlos Ferrero is well  
> served by this article - they get a general overview and a link to  
> his website. Less useful if you don't speak Spanish, but I'm guessing  
> we'd be hard pressed for comprehensive English-language sources on  
> him anyway. (We'd get a good number, but most of them would be  
> incomplete and writing an article out of them would involve a lot of  
> very messy stitching together.)
> 
> The article is firmly in the large class of articles that is good  
> enough to keep up but not good enough to call done. It should not be  
> speedied, prodded, or deleted through any other means. It should be  
> edited. If that takes a while, it takes a while, but that's OK  
> because the article is serving a useful purpose right now. (Heck, I  
> just learned something from it!)
> 
> -Phil
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> 
And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for 
that..... so it is a poor example.

Yes, with any policy change, someone is going to be able to dig out the 
odd example where it would not really help. If we don't act because of 
marginal damage, then we will never change anything. When we have 1.5 
million articles we need to think bigger than that - and consider net 
impact on the project, not one or two cases.

Whatever we do, the status quo is not an option.

Doc