Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
From:
"Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com>
On 11/30/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006(a)dpbsmith.com> wrote:
What I meant is that _in Wikipedia,_ uncited
material is not high-
quality material.
What do you mean by "high quality"?
Well, according to the verifiability policy, content is _not supposed
to go into Wikipedia at all_ unless it's sourced.
I'd say that content that isn't supposed to be in Wikipedia at all
can hardly be considered to be "high quality" _for Wikipedia_.
That's going to be my last reply, as it seems to me that basically
you do not agree with the verifiability policy.
The verifiability policy has never been a hardline policy, but a
guideline and something to aim towards. When it was first adopted,
nobody thought it meant that we should summarily delete the 80%+ of the
encyclopedia that at the time was unsourced. Instead what it meant was
that we should begin going through and adding sources to it.
In general some amount of common sense is required. Claims that are
almost certainly true but uncited should be left in and have a citation
supplied---this is what the {{fact}} tag is for. Claims that are
surprising or unlikely should be removed or moved to the talk page,
pending some verification that they actually are true. Claims that are
negative claims about a living individual should be treated in the
second manner by default. We wouldn't have a living-persons policy, a
{{fact}} template, or any number of other such things if our
verifiability policy were that all unsourced statements should be
summarily deleted.
-Mark