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

[Phil Sandifer]

On Mar 31, 2007, at 12:41 PM, doc wrote:

> And it would take you under a min to find a second citation for
> that..... so it is a poor example.

But what would a second citation add to that article? Or, more to the  
point, how is the lack of a second citation something so bad that the  
article should be deleted unless it gets one?

> 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorran_Democratic_Centre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b-5 (Only source is the  
primary source)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_University_Press
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_on_the_Family_Institute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ferguson_%28organist%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Institute_for_the_Certification_of_Computing_Professionals

Would you like me to find more? Now, mind you, I don't know for 100%  
certain that, for instance, the Focus on the Family Institute is  
notable. But all of these articles are short, descriptive articles  
that rely entirely on a primary source.

I also am pretty certain that instead of gutting bad articles what  
would happen here is that articles on politicians in non-English  
speaking countries would get gutted. We would lose our coverage on  
the non-English speaking world rapidly. For instance, that first link  
- the Andorran Democratic Centre? None of our articles on Andorran  
political parties would survive this proposal. Neither would our  
Peruvian politicians.

The need to improve sourcing does not outweigh the need to have some,  
albeit stubby, coverage in these areas. And putting a seven day  
timeline on fixing that is not useful - it's a double or nothing  
gambit that's far, far too likely to leave us with nothing. We cannot  
allow our sourcing paranoia to gut entire major areas of the  
encyclopedia.

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

Sure it is. We have a pretty good encyclopedia. It's improving. I see  
little reason to gut its content. Deleting to write a better  
encyclopedia is like fucking for chastity.

-Phil