[WikiEN-l] Removing unsourced information

[David Goodman]

I've been checking our FAs, and they too contain unsourced material.
It is presumably sourced in the general references somewhere. The best
way of making such article totally unreadable would be to put inline
sources for every sentence. The only place I have ever seen it done is
some of  the more recondite academic works in the humanities, the ones
where there is actually a greater amount of footnotes than text. I
appreciate it very much when I want to actually see the detailed state
of knowledge on a fully professional level in one of the relatively
few areas where I know enough to do it. I do not appreciate it when I
want to read about something in an encyclopedia. The point of an
encyclopedia is to summarize knowledge, not simply reproduce it. We
want to be correct, but we do not want to be pedantic.

But even the most extensive inline references   do assume the reader's
good faith in there not being omissions of  significant. Selective
footnoting, like selective quoting, is a standard method of one-sided
argument.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 7:31 PM, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> On 01/26/2010 01:18 PM, Ken Arromdee wrote:
>> The problem is that even if you're only supposed to remove contentious
>> unsourced material, there's absolutely nothing anyone can do to you if you
>> remove noncontentious material.
>>
>
> I think it's reasonable to ask the remover if they're actually
> contending the quality of the material, or otherwise believe it to be
> contentious.
>
> I'm sure some small fraction of people will be disingenuous about the
> contentiousness of some paragraph, but we have other ways of dealing
> with people who have a pattern of acting in bad faith.
>
> William
>
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