[WikiEN-l] Administrator coup / mass deletions

[David Goodman]

The proposed deletion, and tagging of articles asserted to be
unsourced included a large number of articles that were in fact
sourced. The most common reason was that suitable sources were put in
the external references section, and merely had to be moved. Next most
common was that they had been inserted in the text, but without using
reference tags.
And then there are the articles being prodded because the sources are
not inline, even when they are adequate.

Blanking does less harm than deletion, but it still does harm
1. the usual naïve viewer will not realise there;s an article in the
history, no matter what notice is placed. Only the editors know about
the page history, and almost nobody reads notices.
2. in the time spent to see if there are sources, a source could be
added about half the time.
3. there is no reason to think the unsourced BLPs have more actual
problems than the sourced ones, whether minimally sourced or even
reasonably sourced. Apart from unsourced statements that are actual
problems, many BLP violations (and NPOV violations generally) come
from the   failure , sometimes the deliberate failure, to include
relevant material. Therefore, concentrating on these distracts us from
the actual problems here. We don't know how to deal with the demands
of doing accurate work in any sort of article, and this project is an
irrelevant anodyne.


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



On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:43 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would be uncomfortable with about blanking articles, if it couldnt
>> do better in telling whether or not something is referenced than the
>> last week or so of deletion nomination has done.
>>
>> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
> I've read this five or six times and I can't figure out what you're
> trying to say. Could you rephrase please?
>
> - causa sui
>
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