Wikipedia talk:Requests for verification

message: This proposal has not reached consensus, but is continuing to move forward in addressing a long standing and ongoing debate in en.wikipedia.  Please enter points that you beleive we have consensus on so far in this discussion. Jeepday (talk) 02:49, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Consensus Points

message: Opening discussion for 'Requests for verification (RFV} can be found at Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#Age of unreferenced Signed Jeepday (talk) 02:46, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Opening discussion for RFV

message: This sort of thing has been proposed many times and never gets consensus. If you want to see more sources in articles, just add them - more process is not the way to resolve these backlogs. Isn't there a perennial proposals page that this can be added to? — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:00, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, this sounds like a good idea. Contrary to what Semperf says, there are many articles that are entirely unsourced and likely to stay that way even in the face of research. This information needs to be cited and removed, and this is a fine way to give everyone fair notice so they don't cry foul when the unsourced content gets removed. Until(1 == 2) 13:06, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Simply no

message: * Past failure to uphold policy is not a valid argument to continue not following policy.  Wikipedia:No original research is clear that all content must be referenced  - Wikipedia is not the place for original research. Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked: the only way to demonstrate that you are not presenting original research is to cite reliable sources that provide information directly related to the topic of the article, and to adhere to what those sources say. - Though giving thought to past argument is valid request thank you for providing the reference CBM. Signed Jeepday (talk) 13:12, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, this sounds like a good idea. Contrary to what Semperf says, there are many articles that are entirely unsourced and likely to stay that way even in the face of research. This information needs to be cited and removed, and this is a fine way to give everyone fair notice so they don't cry foul when the unsourced content gets removed. Until(1 == 2) 13:06, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Rebuttal to "Simply no"

message: "This page has been listed on the requests for verification list. (Add entry to list.)
It has been suggested that this entry might not meet Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion without additional documentation. If evidence is not provided, the article may possibly be proposed for deletion." 
We can say : it will be deleted--Afd decides on deletion, and they do not follow this criterion--they follow verifiable. capable of being verified, and this is one of the principles there. How do we propose to remove articles without going there? How do we propose  to convince the people who form the consensus to follow this policy? We cant. If this is adopted, it will be ignored.  If it is by chance not ignored, it will shift the fighting to  the degree of verification. 
We should not be trying to find reasons to delete, or a way to delete. We should be trying to find a way to persuade people to try to source material. All material, of any age.  The whole point of this project is to improve WP , by upgrading the articles, and only as a very last resort, removing those which cannot be shown to be important by adequate sources. (whatever degree of importance may be the criterion--which is a whole additional story)DGG (talk) 05:13, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: alternative

message: When I proposed Wikipedia:Requests for verification I was working under the assumptions below that deleting an unreferenced article is supported by Wikipedia policy as indicated in this  History entry and we only needed to build the template.  Jossi responded that "it sets policy, by stating a 30 days period" here. 
===New article warning===
When an editor opens Editing NEW ARTICLE to begin a new article intermediately above the edit window is the bold statement Articles that do not cite reliable published sources are likely to be deleted.
Image:Editing NEW Article.JPG
===Challenged===
Per WP:V "Any edit lacking a source may be removed", some would argue that content must be challenged before it is removed.  I think placing placing  with the statement "If evidence is not provided within a month, the disputed information will be removed." would qualify as a challenge. 
===Burden===
Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden of evidence "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material".  Clearly the burden of providing reference lies with the editor who added the article.
===Reference requirement===
Wikipedia:No original research Wikipedia is not the place for original research. Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked: the only way to demonstrate that you are not presenting original research is to cite reliable sources that provide information directly related to the topic of the article, and to adhere to what those sources say..  Clearly to meet the core content policy NOR you must cite references.  
===Prohibiting deletion===
Last there is no policy or guideline prohibiting the deletion of unreferenced articles.  I have looked and I have asked, if there is a policy prohibiting the deletion of unreferenced article someone please point it out. 
===Conclusion===
We have multiple policies and expectations in Wikipedia to remove unreferenced questionable material and articles.  I am a believer in There is no deadline, but no deadline does not mean we ignore encyclopedic expectations indefinitely.  The is no question if an editor sees unreferenced content they are encouraged to find reference and improve the article, But they are not required to search for references.  Any editor may challenge any unreferenced content, there is no criteria that an editor can only challenge specific  unreferenced content.  The only policy question to decide here what is a fair length of time to allow the contributing editor (or any editor) to add references once an article has been challenged?  Jeepday (talk) 03:38, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Five premises and a conclusion

message: We have multiple policies and expectations in Wikipedia to remove unreferenced questionable material and articles.  I am a believer in There is no deadline, but no deadline does not mean we ignore encyclopedic expectations indefinitely.  The is no question if an editor sees unreferenced content they are encouraged to find reference and improve the article, But they are not required to search for references.  Any editor may challenge any unreferenced content, there is no criteria that an editor can only challenge specific  unreferenced content.  The only policy question to decide here what is a fair length of time to allow the contributing editor (or any editor) to add references once an article has been challenged?  Jeepday (talk) 03:38, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Conclusion

message: I have updated the main page to address many of the concerns above.  Please take a look and provide feed back. Jeepday (talk) 13:56, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually like this proposal (it's being discussed on the mailing list).  Seems to me like a good way of enforcing citation, which will ultimately improve the wiki (if it forces people to cite). Giggy UCP 04:22, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Updating to address concerns

message: My opinion: this proposal is a huge mistake. Rather than tag and delete articles without sources, do some research and add sources. We are here to build an encyclopedia and we welcome contributions of people that do not necessarily read or know our policies. We should welcome their contributions, and source material that we find unsourced. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 04:21, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See Wikipedia:Article_Rescue_Squadron. A project worth joining, IMO. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 04:37, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

text: Jossi, in your knee-jerk reaction to any mention of deleting articles you seem to have completely missed the point. ARS and this project are not opposites, they are partners. If this is concentrated effort to bring attention and force the verification of articles, then it's doing a favor for those who don't want to see articles deleted for a lack of sources by making a handy list of articles for ARS to work on. VanTucky (talk) 04:50, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If an article is not verifiable, meaning that when you encounter such an article and cannot find even one source for it, you place  on it. The proposed process does not entice people to look for sources, but places the burden on others, mnost likely the ocassional editor that will never see the warning. Rather than tagging with RVF, do 5 minutes of research and find a source. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 05:24, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The difference between  and  are significant and those differences work to improve the likelihood that good articles will not be lost.  For one  only addressed lack of references so projects like ARS can focus on articles that have more potentially to be saved.  Second it provides 30 days instead of 5 to address the lack of reference.  In my work at Wikipedia:Requests for verification I have found that you can't always find a reference in 5 minutes, if the article is clearly not notable then by all means place a , but if there is any chance of the article being a valuable article in Wikipedia put a  on the article and a  on the authors page. Jeepday (talk) 13:01, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

text: Oh yeah, If 10 people opposed to this process will promise to reference 10 unreferenced articles a week for the next year, or delete them if there aren't references to be found, I'll oppose this proposal :-) --W.marsh 14:23, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  This proposal is a huge mistake 

message: This seems like a duplicate to  or a less-effective version of AFD, as it provides no space for extensive discussion. And is going to be applied to any unreferenced article? VanTucky (talk) 04:46, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See response above at #This proposal is a huge mistake Jeepday (talk) 13:04, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

text: Not really... people can remove PROD for any reason, they don't even have to give a reason (some people in fact revel in not giving a reason). This process requires an actual reference to be added before the template can be removed. That is a huge difference. --W.marsh 14:18, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  tag template 

message: WikiEN-l: Proposed "prod" for articles with no sources ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 05:07, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mailing list thread on this proposal 

message: I placed the variation of the thread on WP:V and WP:OR as well as all the active project pages I am aware of. 
Please see:
Wikipedia:Requests for verification
A proposal designed as a process similar to  to delete articles without sources if no sources are provided in 30 days.
It reads:
This page has been listed in :Category:Requests for verification.It has been suggested that this article might not meet Wikipedia's core content policies Verifiability and/or No original research.  If references are not cited within a month, the disputed information will be removed.
If you can address this concern by sourcing please [ edit this page] and do so. You may remove this message if you reference the article. 
The article may be deleted if this message remains in place for 30 days.
If you created the article, please don't take offense. Instead, improve the article so that it is acceptable according to Verifiability and/or No original research.
Please help [ improve this article] by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Some editors see this as necessary to improve Wikipedia as a whole  
and assert that this idea is supported by policy, and others see this as a negative thing for the project with the potential of loss of articles that could be easily sourced.
I would encourage your comments in that page's talk or Mailing list thread on this proposal  WikiEN-l: Proposed "prod" for articles with no sources
Signed Jeepday (talk) 14:15, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Variation

message: I propose that the editor placing an RfV tag on an article should have to do a Google search to find obvious sources first. In my experience, 99% of the time something usable turns up from just cutting and pasting the headwords into Google. If someone else later finds an appropriate reference from a simple Google search strategy, the first editor should be liable to a punitive block. 
Also certain types of article should be exempt as self referencing, including:
*Books/journals with an ISBN/ISSN
*Physical locations with a grid reference or lat/longitude
Espresso Addict 05:47, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that everyone agrees that all editors should make attempts to improve articles.  But as discussed in #Five premises and a conclusion above the requirement and burden of sourcing is addressed in other policy pages.  RFV only address the addresses the time line for deleting completely unreferenced articles.  There are multiple projects working to verify and reference articles some are discussed on this talk page. Jeepday (talk) 13:28, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another suggestion 

message: See WP:TIND for reasons why time limits should be avoided.
Deletion without community oversight is potentially problematic.  WP:PROD was a very contentious proposal, and only succeeded because it solved a serious problem: the volume of uncontested deletions was becoming too high to manage.  Deletion of unsourced articles is a more contentious subject than uncontested deletions (obviously).  Unsourced articles are sometimes kept when they are discussed at AFD (although it is less likely for them to survive now than it was six months ago, I note).  This oversight is necessary. JulesH 14:16, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am working on Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles and making this proposal. Jeepday (talk) 02:10, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time limit and automated deletion are not appropriate. 

message: I've seen a number of people here state that editors should always find references instead of tagging with ,  or . (Emphasis mine). I invite any of you who feel that way to work on the Dead End Pages project for a while. Every couple of months we get several thousand articles to slog through, trying to evaluate which should be proposed for deletion and which just need a little improvement. Yes, it's ideal to completely wikify each article, properly categorized it, and find quality references for each article, but the reality is that we'd only get through about 1% of the articles that way. (Even fewer, because we'd lose about half the people currently working on the project.)--Fabrictramp 16:59, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: My proposal above was just a teensy bit tongue in cheek, and wasn't meant to attack those brave souls who attempt to improve the really poor articles. I do, however, think the current proposal to delete tagged articles is ill founded, and would lead to the destruction of valuable articles that could easily be sourced if the right people could be induced to look at them. Espresso Addict 22:07, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry that my reply was a teensy bit frustrated. *grin* You'll notice that I didn't comment on the proposal itself, because I'm not quite sure yet how I feel about it. I certainly don't want potentially good articles deleted. But I do find a lot of articles that I feel conflicted about -- I can't find good sources in the first several pages of ghits, but a 5 day prod seems unnecessarily harsh.--Fabrictramp 00:03, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  A note of context, when judging this proposal consider that is coming from an editor with thousands of edits, most of which are adding references or other clean up work.  The same editor who was a founding team member of Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles and contributer to many previous clean up projects.  You both have good points, I invite you to support this proposal and join Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles or a similar project. Jeepday (talk) 02:22, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll consider joining when the current assessment drive on WikiProject Biography is over. I just don't have any spare time right now. Espresso Addict 02:49, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Great! I look forward to seeing you there. Feel free to stop in anytime and just do one or stay for a while and try to complete a letter of the alphabet. Jeepday (talk) 02:57, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Tagging is sometimes appropriate

message: Normally I would be strongly against adding a new deletion process.  However there is one problem where I feel is that the existing processes completely fail us on.  This problem is an article being made which is completely incorrect, maybe a hoax, maybe a rumor, who really knows.  This article has no sources and it sits around long enough for other places to pickup on it and copy this information.  After a year or so when someone tries to source it, the WP article predates all the google hits.  Are they really possible sources, or is this self-propagating circle of bad information?  Who can tell.  This problem is rare, but I think it serious enough consider making a new effort to see that articles have at least one source before they get very old.  I don't know if this proposal is the answer to that, but I think it is the most problematic sourcing issue out there.  I have two separate suggestions which might answer some of the objections raised against this proposal.
#One way I would like this proposal better if it focused on new articles, say created in the past week.  Not only will such a restriction focus this on a manageable group of articles, but it will have a much better chance of catching the attention of the original contributor.  It would also make this a poor tool for people who just want to delete articles on certain subjects.  This would  definitely prevent more of problems I outlined above from developing.
#Another thing change that would make this proposal more acceptable to me is if rather than deleting articles after 30 days they would be put in line for on AFD.  This would still allow this tag to create a useful list of article needing sources as VanTucky suggests (I can assure you  does NOT already provide this).  I would imagine it is possible to have a bot add these articles to AfD after the 30 days expire making it as painless as possible.  If someone had to tell the bot how many to add each day; it wold prevent AfD from ever getting overloaded because alot were tagged at once or there it already being a busy day at AfD.  Then every article would get (a) a fire lit under the original contributer and anyone watchlisting it to source it, (b) put in convenient list for sourcing projects, and (c) the individual evaluation it deserves at AfD.  At the same time we should make a template to leave on talkpages of people who tag articles that can be sourced in five minutes with google, a tailored version of .  This would not be the right tag for easily sourced articles.
I am not sure either of those suggestions would make this proposal workable, but I do think something needs to be done to at least ensure new articles coming in are quickly meeting some basic standards.  We can eventually get through the existing sourcing backlogs, as long as we can stop more newly created articles from joining the pile every day.--BirgitteSB 19:39, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Birgitte we are of similar minds.  I agree that this would be used to best effect on newer article, but with the current back log it would be challenging.  The proposal already is only focused on newer articles (after January 1, 2007).  When this proposal gets approved we can work on the backlog from opposite ends of the unreferenced timeline.  On the forward to AfD, I hear where you are coming from by adding even more committee involvement.  But I think that would be counter to the rationale for  to decrease the impact to AfD. Jeepday (talk) 02:37, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Re suggestion #1.  I understand the proposed focus, but there are some valid objections to applying this to all articles since Jan 1 2007.   If people creating articles without sources would get a message in the first week about this tag, we may be able to train them to start declaring sources from the beginning.  Yes the backlog would still be a separate problem, however we will be much better off a year from now and the smaller number of articles going through this system will mean they get closer attention.--BirgitteSB 15:44, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Are you suggesting that it should only be used on articles less then a week old?Jeepday (talk) 12:29, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes--BirgitteSB 13:04, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

text:  I will mull this over are reply later. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk)
*DGG The general idea is certainly acceptable. But there are some major considerations involving the interaction with other processes, and also with the original goals of the project.
#First, the original goal of the project was, at least in part to improve existing articles, and the need to do so remains. This should continue, perhaps as a separate project. The key element of the process would be that it does not lead inexorably to deletion if nothing is done, but rather to successive rounds of improvement--together with the merging or deletion of whatever unacceptable articles may be found. I see this as dealing with completely unsourced article as well as articles containing grossly inadequate sources.
## The grossly inadequate sources include material taken from older encyclopedias with no updating, or with the updating being unsourced; some of these articles  will be among the most difficult to deal with adequately for those without convenient access to major print collections. 
## They also include articles taken  from other language WPedias that do not have consistent sourcing--most notable the German WP, where material that would reasonably be expected to be available from common German-language reference sources has not in general been specifically sourced---but where most of these articles will be about notable subjects & the contents will be accurate.  Sourcing some of these will require a knowledge of German, an awareness of German-language sources--especially those likely to have been relied on in writing the articles, access to the material, and often subject knowledge. The same problem is present to a lesser extent in material from the French and some other language WPs. 
## More important, there are also a considerable number of older articles dealing with individuals or containing material on individuals, that are in gross violation of current BLP standards. In many of these cases it is a question not just of sourcing, but of NPOV, accuracy, and notability. 
## It is also the case that a certain percentage of the unsourced articles will be quite clearly non-notable, and best dealt with by merging or deletion. Probably the least obtrusive way to handle them is by merging when possible. There is a separate notability project, fairly well organized and efficient, which has now dealt with all notability tags placed through the end of October 2006, and will soon reach the beginning of 2007. I'd suggest those primarily interested in this aspect work within that project. I help out there a little myself. 
#The problem with newer articles is first the existing   policy on stubs, and then the coordination with New Page patrol and the existing deletion processes, and with the
##. Stubs are presently not handled in a satisfactory manner. There are two sorts of stubs--what are informally called permastubs, or very short articles, and the stub intended to be expanded. Permastubs are, for example, articles on such people as 19th century  major league baseball players, or small villages, where it has been decided that the entire class is individually notable but there are insufficient secondary sources to write a full article without doing Original Research in Primary Sources. There is precedent for this even in print encyclopedias--Brittanica for example has always had one-paragraph articles on less important people and towns. (Approaches to changing this policy should be done very cautiously; personally, I'd leave the established classes of this sort alone, but resist additional ones.) 
## But the sort of stub to establish a place for an new article and encourage someone to eventually expand this has always been considered acceptable. There are minimum requirements for one--see WP:STUB. However, this requirement does not include a source! The assumption has apparently been that the stub tag will result in a further check to see that it gets expanded properly. 
##Perhaps that is not a good idea. But the first step is to discuss it of WP:STUB. I would support changing the policy to require at least one source, whether a reference or an informative external link, on new stubs. I'm not sure I would support having a 3rd part reference at first. It is in my opinion reasonable to enter a page about a clearly notable organization based ont their home page, as long as it does not sound like advertising. 
## As for New Page Patrol, most people who do it look for articles immediately after creation. Due to system limitation, it may not be possible to go back one week without some programming. There is no point in looking at the immediately created pages with this only in mind--a great many of them will be deletable  on other grounds; but if one is doing NPP anyway, this could well be something additional to look for. (another problem is that people often make multiple edits in an article in the first few minutes, and this way you'll get it before they have a chance to add references. A more experienced admin told me he checks by looking a few thousand items back, and I have been doing likewise: the method is to  go to special:New pages, and click "next 600" In the browser address box, you'll se the parameters "limit" and "offset" Change offset to 6000. This currently take you 3 days back, after most of the junk has been deleted. I just looked at 20 of them.   4 articles that were almost certainly about notable subjects and that  clearly should have had refs. did not have them. (and I found one A7 to speedy-delete). There were also 2 articles with refs referred to in the text, but without a ref. section--these of course just need moving the information.  So the yield might be worthwhile.  
## The question is then whether you would want to try to   source at least from Google rather than notifying immediately.  In favor of trying, It can be just as easy, & it immediately solves the problem. In favor of notifying, is that it educates people. In any case, if nothing is done,  I would very strongly advise continuing your present procedure of trying seriously to source it yourselves rather than nominating them for deletion.  
## Next question is how to handle them. I would try very hard to merge instead, and I would do it by a separate proposed merge tag, according to WP:MERGE, which requires another five day wait.  If its disputed, then its a matter of convincing the people there that merge would be better.  
##It would be highly inadvisable to add to the work at Afd. there are already between 100 to 150 items a day, and to follow it carefully takes several hours a day. I follow only about one in 10 & it still takes an hour a day. Further, it is the established practice at afd that an article will not be deleted just for being unsourced if it seems notable and sourceable. So if you do bring things there, you should be prepared to document where you had tried to source it. 
DGG (talk) 19:44, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not sure what I think about this proposal 

message: I've long suggested something along these lines (and I'm an inclusionist). The problem with this particular suggestion - as with the abuse of PROD and AfD for similar ends - is that it's completely arbitrary. The article gets nominated when some random who wants the article deleted nominates it, and anyone who wants the article kept has to drop what they're doing and fight it. It breeds nastiness, and it wastes time.
What would be a much more effective process is to treat unsourced articles similarly to the way we used to treat images back when copyright was just beginning to be enforced properly. We could have a bot tag a certain number of articles a month, and give people say, a three month window to actually get them sourced. You'd still have the time window before deletion to put pressure on people to actually source their work, but you'd be giving them more than enough time to do it - actually giving people time to get to libraries if necessary, and without forcing people to immediately drop any other projects on someone else's whim. Rebecca 06:34, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The suggest for AfD at one end is one persons suggestion the same as your suggestion of an increase to 3 months prior to delete is one persons suggestion. Jeepday (talk) 13:27, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: This proposal has the right heart, but is implemented really badly

message: There is clearly no consensus for this to become a guideline.  Perhaps we should tag it as rejected and move on? JulesH 07:38, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What definition of "clearly no consensus" are you using to base this suggestion on? Per Consensus requires serious treatment of every group member's considered opinion Per Consensus decision-making a decision-making process that not only seeks the agreement of most participants, but also to resolve or mitigate the objections of the minority to achieve the most agreeable decision. I don't beleive that 6 days qualifies as serious treatment of this proposed Policy.  Many of the objections to this proposed Policy are unrelated to this policy, they are complaints about other policies, while valuable to this discussion they are not relevant to forming consensus for a time period to implement a standing policy.  It is interesting you offer to reject this guideline, when you have not logged any opinion on the proposed policy talk page.  If you have objects, please state them. Jeepday (talk) 13:46, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time to tag as rejected? 

message: I'm leaving wikipedia soon, so this will be my only comment on the proposal. It seems to me this is a very good proposal. Sadly, as with a number of other good proposals, it looks like it's going to die because the existing viewpoint is too entrenched. Perhaps when things get messy enough that people will see the merits it will come back, but I'm not holding my breath. Sad to say, far too many people seem to think that utterly crap content is better then no content (IMHO a lot of the time this is not true). And many also seem to think that we shouldn't encourage and expect editors to contribute content that meets policy. But even though it's a good thing if an editor is willing to contribute content in the form of an article, if said editor is unwilling or unable to provide at least one reference for said article in 30 days then as hard as this may be for others to accept, we are in fact nearly always better off without their contributed articles. This may sound harsh but it's the truth. Verifiability and NOR are cornerstone policies and it's simply not acceptable to encourage editors to contribute without also encouraging and expecting them to abide by these policies. Also, contrary to what some seem to be suggested on this talk page, I don't think many supporters of the policy are saying that we should jump on newcomers the moment they write something unreferenced. Instead what is being said is that it is vitally important that all editors (newcomers or old) reference what they write and if they don't then there is nothing wrong with telling them that they should. Also, I think all this talk of wikilawyering and POV pushers is missing the point. Yes, wikilawyering and POV pushers are a problem and can be incredibly frustrating. But rather then shunning good policy because of the fear it'll be misused by wikilawyering and POV pushers, we need to fight them by not giving them room. Proper referencing and not allowing useful to be baited will make it a lot more difficult for these people to operate. But far to often they are almost encouraged to operate by the poor editing practice and behaviour of well meaning editors Nil Einne 15:48, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Very good proposal 

message: I see some posisble merit in this idea, but it needs refinement. I think that many of DGG's commetns above are well taken. I also think that an editor placing thsi tag whould be required to certicy that s/he has made a reasonable search for references, and has been unable to find any relevant ones. It was said above that current policy palces the burden of findign refs on the contributor, not the challanger. Thnat is true, but if this propoisal is to change policy by proposing a new deletion mechanism, it is IMO reasonable to also change it that anyone choosing to tag via this mechanism be required to do at least a basic search for references, since no one wants to delete reasoanble articels merly because redily available refs have not yet been added to the article. DES (talk) 21:45, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible merit 

message: ... I still do not see anything in this proposal that cannot be addressed by , and existing processes. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 23:50, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The existing processes were never meant to deal with the issue of unreferenced but notable articles, and they deal with it remarkably badly, generating minimum results for maximum nastiness. This process was at least an attempt, albeit a flawed one, at coming to a rational solution to the problem. Rebecca 03:36, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't think so... Use , for example. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 15:51, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Though I don't support this proposal as suggested, I have to agree with Rebecca. It's very tempting to simply remove a prod tag with a rationale of "Unreferenced article since August 2006". That rationale does not suggest that any sort of attempt was made to find referenced before slapping on the  tag. Black Falcon (Talk) 20:05, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's also completely not what PROD was intended for, and I'd consider an appropriate response to such a tagging to be to remove it and tell the tagger to get stuffed. We need to be sourcing material, not deleting notable material through incompetence. Rebecca 02:33, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I also agree that  is not appropriate use of PROD. Jeepday (talk) 13:21, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  After further consideration... 

message: Back up in Five premises and a conclusion, Jeepday quoted Wikipedia:Verifiability which says, "Any edit lacking a source may be removed".  The key point, for me, is that the policy does not say, "Any edit lacking a source must be removed".
If you come across a dubious statement or one you suspect of having been entered in less than good faith, by all means, tag it  with  or  or whatever and then, suitably later, if no citation is forthcoming, delete it.  That's all doable under existing policy.  The objection many of us have with the proposed RfV policy is that it seems to steer us ever closer to a more draconian Wikipedia in which any and every unsourced statement will be removed, no matter what. —Steve Summit (talk) 15:19, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  RFV is discussing the deletion of complete articles that are unreferenced. Jeepday (talk) 13:24, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  the fundamental question 

message: Conversation seems to have stopped on this page.  The last entires are ones I made at #Consensus Points.  Does anyone have thoughts on consensus that has been reached or next steps for this proposal? Jeepday (talk) 13:47, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: there was no consensus. The next step, in my opinion, would be to mark this as rejected. DGG (talk) 23:38, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think I am going to have to agree with you.  We did make some headed way maybe in a couple years it can be readdressed.  I see Radiant! has marked it appropriately, so... Jeepday (talk) 02:23, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Next Steps