User:Veverve/Unsourced information is not valuable

Someone put some efforts chewing this chewing gum and sticking it under a table. Later, other people diligently added to this first painstaking chewed piece of gum, by adding their own work to it in the same way. It is now the amalgmation of many people's willingness and dedication to chew chewing gum and stick their used pieces of gum at the same place.
Does others having taken the time and efforts to contribute to this stain justify keeping such a filth? Should it be kept because it has been dirtying the place for so long? Should one ask before removing it? If removed, should this sticky mess be added back in the name of other people linking it and/or having contributed to it?

On Wikipedia, uncited information and information unfaithful to the cited references are not precious, nor can they be considered to be work of any value.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, adding unsourced information on Wikipedia amounts to nothing more than digital graffitis. Those unsourced additions can be due to users – among other things – forgetting to add a reference, adding something from memory they heard or read somewhere, joking, or trolling. Those additions have very real consequences outside of Wikipedia.

The removal of unsourced information is therefore completely and totally legitimate on Wikipedia: it improve articles by removing unverifiable information and prevents disinformation and misinformation from spreading.

What is "sourced"?

The most reliable way to identify a source and to check whether or not the source given supports what the Wikipedia article states, and therefore to insure Verifiability, is to use inline citations that are complete enough to allow for anyone to check where in the source they should search (e.g. for books having enough information to identify the book and the chapter(s) and page(s) supposedly supporting the information).

References which are too imprecise to identify where the information is supposed to be found in the source, or to identify the source itself, can be discarded. Those references which are too imprecise to be useful include, but are not limited to:

• printed works with no publication date or edition details if the work has more than one edition (a new edition is different from a mere reprint);
• encyclopedias or dictionaries with either no entry or no page number given;
• books, journals, newspapers or magazines, with no page number nor chapter/article title given;
• most references which are along the lines of "op. cit." or "Idem." (since most of the time they contain no indication allowing one to clearly know what the previously cited work or reference is, due to how Wikipedia works);
• obscure references containing only things like "Letter 45" with no indication of a published work.

Why remove unsourced material?

Is that true? Is it not true? As a reader of Wikipedia, I have no easy way to know. If it is true, it should be easy to supply a reference. If it is not true, it should be removed.

I really want to encourage a much stronger culture which says: it is better to have no information, than to have information like this, with no sources. Any editor who removes such things, and refuses to allow it back without an actual and appropriate source, should be the recipient of a barnstar.

— Jimbo Wales, 19 July 2006

Those who remove things which are unsourced from an article do not do it just for fun. Rather, they do so because they feel compelled to act as such to improve the articles.

The reasons they feel compelled can be varied (see every sections below, apart from the last one).

Not every work done on Wikipedia has the same value

Unsourced material is most of the time unhelpful.

The mere presence of information does not make an article better. It is having reliably sourced information which can be verified that improve an article. Loads of unsourced data and material on something are useless noise, for they do not comply with Verifiability. Information in itself is worthless.

On Wikipedia, quality is better than quantity; what defines good quality is not factuality, but verifiability and encyclopedicity. Quality information is valuable. Information of bad quality, in however quantity it may be present (see e.g. WP:TRIVIA sections), is never valuable.

The overwhelming majority of information on Wikipedia is not obvious. Only a tiny fraction of information on Wikipedia could be considered as not needing a reference.

A medium to which things can only be added, and cannot be removed, is not an encyclopedia: it is a dump.

Citogenesis

WP:CITOGENESIS is something which should be avoided at all cost. Citogenesis is really harmful, both for Wikipedia (its credibility), for the scientific community as a whole, and for common readers of Wikipedia.

People, including some reliable academic sources, use Wikipedia uncritically

"I wonder how long it'll take them fo find this hoax?" Probably a long time, especially since unsourced information is too often kept.

Wikipedia is considered by many as an authority, and as such cements ideas in people's heads more than people's own speculations.

Notable examples of this are:

• the name of the Pringles mascott, Julius, was first added to Wikipedia and not removed. It was then acepted by the Pringles company as a fact that their mascott was in fact called 'Julius'.
• the name of the toaster's inventor was a hoax originating from Wikipedia. It was then taken into reliably published works.
• the Brazilian aardvark hoax originating from Wikipedia, which ended into reliably-published works on biology.
• a vandal added the nickname "Millville Meteor" to the Wikipedia article of the baseball player Mike Trout, who subsequently adopted the nickname.

Wikipedia's information has consequences on other people's lives

See also: Wikipedia:Disinformation and Wikipedia:Wikipedia is in the real world

• People use Wikipedia to promote themselves, or to fraud. Organisations have been accused of using Wikipedia as a mean of promotion since at least 2005 (see also WP:NOADS).
• Wikipedia is often invoked in online discussions, to obtain information on a topic form a third-party considered as neutral.
• Wikipedia's information are often the very first thing someone sees when asking the widely used Google Search a question or making some research on a topic using this search engine. Hence, a hoax on Wikipedia can spread to people who do not even read Wikipedia articles where the hoax is present.
• Wikipedia can also be used as a mean of political propaganda by some governements.

Hence, it is important to have information on Wikipedia sourced by reliable, clearly identifiable sources. And it is equally important to faithfully convey on Wikipedia what those sources say.

Burden is on you to add a source, time does not matter

• The WP:BURDEN policy state: "All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and it is satisfied by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution." (emphasis in original)

• WP:UNCHALLENGED is not a good arguments

Having nothing is better than having something bad

Think about the following:

• It is better to have no information on something, than to have wrong information.
• It is better to have an unpainted wall than a wall vandalised by dreadful graffitis.

On a related topic, a user has stated: "It is worse to have an article on a notable subject than not to have it, if it contains information that is misleading, or could be slanted, due to a lack of sources to verify the text is still accurate".

To quote Jimmy Wales, back in 2006: "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, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons."

Copyright issues

Unsourced information could be a copy-paste from a copyrighted source. The importance of providing references will be illustrated by an example.

The article Richard Williams Morgan has had 8 years of its revision history deleted, because one extensive part of the article was a close paraphrasing from a source with no inline attribution. Among the deleted revisions of the time, the only versions which remain are those where someone removed what was unsourced.

The removal of those revisions for all users (except administrators) makes it very difficult to check the evolution of an article, since a formal admin request must be made to have a look at it. Such explorations of an article's history are sometimes necessary, e.g. to find if a user has inadvertently moved a source to another place, to find when a hoax was introduced, how the meaning of a sentence was changed to something completely different over the years due to numerous users each changing one or two words, or to find the meaning of obscure sources (usually something like "Smith, p. XX").

Why should you care?

According to user Mary Mark Ockerbloom, one of Wikipedia's goals is to fight disinformation.

As of 2020, Wikipedia was part of the top 15 of the world's most visited websites. Information there can and will spread quickly and throughout the entire world. World events or death of world famous people will make people come on Wikipedia to read about it; a good example of this is the fact that in 2020, the death of Kobe Bryant has caused "DDOS-like outages" to Wikipedia, due to the number of people coming to Wikipedia to read about Bryant's death.

One of Wikipedia's pillars is Verifiability. If you prefer to add or retain unsourced information, if you believe the burden of source is on the person removing something unsourced, if you believe all material present on Wikipedia (however terrible it can be) is valuable and worth keeping, if you believe citogenesis is not a concern to be taken seriously, or if you believe that removing unsourced information on Wikipedia always amounts to vandalism, gratuitous destruction or trolling: then you do not comply with this pillar and thus are WP:NOTHERE.

But I want to source it later!

It may come a time when a user will be unable to add a source to unsourced material right away, but will ask for the unsourced material to be kept in hope they or another user will be able to source it in the future.

This is not a proper argument to keep unsourced material for a long time, since information on Wikipedia has to be sourced most of the time. However, letting the user do their research to add source to specific unsourced material for one week (7 days) before deleting said material can be a good compromise.

On Wikipedia, apart from deleted revisions, everything is archived in the page history. You can come back anytime you want to see versions of an article which had its unsourced information deleted to try to find sources for said unsourced information. You can then add this information with the source(s) you have found, to the current version of the article.

If you want other people's help in sourcing deleted or soon to be deleted content, you can add a note at the article's talk page with a link to the version of the article which had its unsourced content deleted and whose content you believe can be sourced in the future (by you or someone else).

Alternatively, you can directly copy-paste on the article's talk page information which will be or have been deleted and which you believe could be sourced in the future (by you or someone else). You must indicate at the talk page which version you have copied the material from. It is also necessary to explain at the talk page why you believe those information could be sourced. The copy-paste should be done using either Template:Talk quote block (for short parts of text) or Template:Collapse (for long parts of text), and Template:Reflist-talk, to contain it. The goal is to get sources, not to keep unsourced material in a sneaky way; therefore, this of course in no way allows you to WP:FORK unsourced content to the talk page.

You must indicate your progress in the search of the sources for this material you mentioned or copy-pasted at the talk page (days later, does it still seem to you that the material can be sourced? Have you found something in your search? If you found nothing, you should also state it).

See also

Essays

• WP:EXPERT
• Wikipedia:You are not a reliable source
• Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth
• Wikipedia:No reliable sources, no verifiability, no article
• Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia
• Wikipedia:Build content to endure
• Wikipedia:The deadline is now
• Wikipedia:Avoid the word "vandal"
• Wikipedia:Most people who disagree with you on content are not vandals
• User:Edward-Woodrow/Unsourced content should be deleted

Policies and guidelines

• WP:OWN
• WP:NEUTRAL
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a reliable source
• Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing: not accepted anymore since September 2020
• Wikipedia:Original research: something which can be prevented by having reliable sourcing in a proper format and faithfuly following the material contained in this sourcing
• Wikipedia:Reliable sources
• WP:PRESERVE
• Wikipedia:Citing sources

Other

• Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Require inline citations for everything