Philip Sandifer wrote:
It is more accurate to say that sourcing, like wikifying, copyediting, and other such things, is a step that articles should go through as they advance towards the good and featured levels. It is an important step. We need more people who are willing to work with sources. But sourcing is not a basic concern, except inasmuch as people need to be *ready* to provide sources.
Well, as simply a descriptive statement about how the encyclopedia works, a new article that has *no* sources stands a good chance of being deleted---and we warn contributors of this up front on the edit page. Basically the "standard" way of creating a new article is to write at least a decent stub with at least one reliable source, and helping new users to understand that will reduce the amount of angst from people unexpectedly getting their articles deleted.
-Mark