User:Becritical/Deleting unsourced material

Why delete unsourced material? I often delete material which has been templated or tagged as unsourced for long periods of time. I usually don't try to find sources for the material. For one thing, that was the duty of the original authors: it is inappropriate to add material to Wikipedia without citing a reliable source.

But there is another reason which has to do with the nature of Wikipedia, and the stage at which the project now finds itself. Wikipedia is full of articles which either lack sources entirely, or have very poor sourcing. These articles were typically written years ago, and no one currently pays attention to them. They may have valuable information... but they may be inaccurate or misleading or outdated.

Wikipedia is a project in decline. It may be just as important as it used to be, but the work of refining and sourcing minor articles on obscure or unpopular subjects is unlikely ever to continue -let alone be completed- on many articles. Wikipedia aspires to be reliable. As the number of editors willing to source and maintain obscure articles declines, Wikipedia must choose between achieving its goal of reliability and retaining much of its text. Formerly, one could pretend that obscure articles would at some point be properly developed, edited, and sourced. This is no longer the case, and we need to prune unsourced or unreliably sourced text from our articles. I consider this a noble effort to increase the reliability of the project. Others may consider it "deletionist" or simply rude. But I submit that in the long run, given Wikipedia's goal of reliability, it is absolutely necessary to the project.


 * "There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative "I heard it somewhere" pseudo information is to be tagged with a "needs a cite" tag. Wrong.  It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced.  This is true of all information..."


 * "I think a fair number of people need to be kicked out of the project just for being lousy writers." -Jimbo Wales

Other sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_failing