[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[Nathan]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:45 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> And to disagree with Gwern: sourcing matters. You can correct subtle
> mistakes, misunderstandings, and sometimes errors of fact in the
> process of sourcing (I sourced a bio the other day where the husband
> of the person involved had died in between when the bio was created
> and when I worked on it; someone has to change "is married to.."
> eventually and that's not the kind of thing you want to guess at). Not
> to mention all the implications for readers, the larger project, etc.
> etc. But personally I pick and choose, and only work on people whose
> lives I find interesting -- I give the footballers, the olympians, and
> the pop stars a miss. Those seem to be the bulk of BLPs, though, and
> it seems like there are ought to be a good way to source those en
> masse, maybe through the relevant wikiprojects.
>
> -- phoebe



I don't think Gwern was saying that sourcing is irrelevant, only that
"unreferenced BLP" is a blunt measurement that doesn't return much
real information about the status of any given article. In a two
paragraph stub, sourcing the date of marriage or birth to a particular
year (and referencing nothing else) exempts the entire article from
the category. It does not exempt the article from the same sorts of
severe problems one might find in a completely unreferenced article:
the distinction between one reference and no references is often
insignificant.

A better way to determine whether an "unreferenced" article should be
deleted might be to read it, but the administrators who decided to
mass delete these articles have been indiscriminate (c.f. Cunctator's
comment about restoring an article on a former prime minister).

I'm sure there are all sorts of other long backlogs of article
problems, even on BLPs. Should all articles tagged with a POV
template, a fact tag, or other 'problem templates' be deleted after a
certain period of time? Clearly there would be too many of them for
anyone to actually fix all of them in a reasonable period of time, say
a week?

Nathan