On Tue, 26 Jan 2010, William Pietri 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.
1) They just have to say "I think that since there's no source it may not be
true"--doubting it *because* it has no source. Of course the need for being
unsourced *and* contentious is redundant if unsourced automatically
implies contentious, but nobody cares about that.
2) This usually happens when someone wants to delete the opposing side
for a controversial subject. For a controversial subject, doubting a
statement is always plausible--everything is contentious.
3) We so strongly stress the need for sources that saying "it's okay, because
it's not contentious" will simply fall on deaf ears. It's a problem
Wikipedia has in other places--so strongly emphasizing some point, and so
strongly deemphasizing the exceptions, that the exceptions become impractical
because nobody will let you use one.