User talk:Veverve/Unsourced information is not valuable

In defense of this essay

I had prepared this response along with two other minor responses, for the MfD discussion; but, I was blocked before and during the MfD's tenure. I have decided to post my answer here, because I do not like to think I worked for nothing. Since the debate is over and all those who intervened in it have had the occasion to give their opinion, and since it is my user space, I forbid any of the participants who gave their opinion to answer the following argument in my user space (is it not merely fair that I now get to discuss the topic while others cannot, like the others did with me?).

First and foremost: thanks to those who have asked to wait until I was unblocked! I do not like the fact the nominator has created this MfD just when I was in the middle of my one-month block and while being fully aware of this block (since they mention it at the very creation of this nomination). And my response has to be lenghty, so most people will likely not read it. Had my response been posted at the MfD discussion, it would have given me almost no chance to make other people change their mind due to its length and the fact it would have come long after everyone has cast their vote; but it would have created the illusion of it being fair since one could have said "you have been able to defend your essay" (I will ignore the "your fault, you should not have gotten blocked" potential remarks, for obvious reasons). At least, now there is no illusion of fairness or habeas corpus. Now, here is my answer.

Keep

"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 include, but are not limited to: * works with no publication date" – Most websites don't give a publication date, and we don't discard them.
-->If you read what comes next, I am only talking about works which have more than one edition. By the way, I should have added that publications with no dates should have the fact theu lack a date mentioned. As can be inferred by the mention of "edition" and "reprint", I did not have in mind websites that publish data without a date. URLs are usually enough to identify an online source.
---->Maybe the wording can be changed. The fact that URLs are usually enough to identify an online source, should be added.

• Sidenote. Still, maybe a web page which, for example, hosts the composition of a country's parliament and gets updated each election, would have to have an access date for the date of its consultation, or an archive link to the version of the page being referred to, since the data will regularly change. There is also the question of the multiple version of a page on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But this seems outside of the scope of my essay, because my essay is general and therefore I do not want to add a focus on this.

Loads of unsourced data and material on something are useless noise, for they do not comply with Verifiability. Information in itself is worthless. – The author seems to have confused cited with verifiable, as in able to be verified. "Smoking tobacco is a major risk factor for lung cancer" is verifiable regardless of whether it's cited.
-->No, I did not confuse those. Common misconceptions are numerous. 1.3 billion people believe that the legitimate head of the whole Christendom for the past 2000 years is the bishop of Rome; numerous apologetic works support this, yet current academic sources disagree with this claim. What I mean is: many people believe, in some cases, that what they say in uncontroversial and that the factuality of their claim can be verified easily, but it is not the case. Now for your your claim of a dichotomy between cited and verifiable.

How is one to know if something can be verified if there is no source? Should one blindly trust Wikipedia and its users (WP:NOTSOURCE)? AGF does not mean one (user or reader) should not ask for a source for the material an user added, or remove a claim which is unsourced; otherwise, the person adding unsourced material would not have to bear the WP:BURDEN* of sourcing in case said material gets removed. Anyone can claim that what they say is verifiable, neutral, and important to understand the topic of the article without providing a source (the "do your own research" so often used when one is unable to provide a source for their claim in a debate). See also in support of this, Wikipedia:You are not a reliable source. Most of the material on WP is not WP:BLUE-level of information (universal common knowledge).

Also, let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the information added can be found, that no source was provided, but that someone later decides to try to find the source to the claim. How is this someone supposed to do so, where should they start? What if, e.g., I provide, without giving any source, my own translation of a quote, meaning that said quote cannot be found easily using Google? What if the information I add can only be found in one printed reference which cannot be accessed online? What if the web page I read to add this information disappears from indexed internet (e.g. the site goes offline), how is one to find if there is an archive of the URL if no URL is provided as source?

Also, sometimes that "useless noise" is an effort at explaining something in simpler language or building the web to related content. For example, one of the author's most recent edits was to added the uncited statement that "Heresy has a specific meaning in the Catholic Church when it applies to someone's belief", and I don't think that contribution is either "useless noise" or "worthless". If we believed that information per se was worthless, none of us would be here.
-->Again, you have misconstrued my argument. I wrote, as you quoted, [i]n the overwhelming majority of cases, adding unsourced information on Wikipedia amounts to nothing more than digital graffitis; I did not say "in every case". Summarising what is in the body of the article in the lead section – the minority of an article – does not require sourcing, so long as the lead section is but a summary of the content found in the body of the article. This is is what a lead section is for. In cases where the article is a stub only consisting of the lead section, of course a source is needed; I have even had an article of this kind draftified due to this, because, said the new page reviewer, [i]nformation that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia) (maybe they should be told that they are going against consensus...).

Furthermore, adding parsimoniously one- or two-line(s) objective and essential descriptions of a subject on a WP article, with the subject hyperlinked to its WP article, does not require a source (e.g. the information that "the Vulgate [is] a 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible that was written largely by Jerome" from my GA Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, was requested to be added in case the reader was no familiar with the topic; yet this information is mentioned nowhere in the article, but Vulgate is hyperlinked and its description is very short, faithful to what the Vulgate WP article says, and describes the topic in its essence and not in its details). I said "parsimoniously": it should be done with care and in a limited number of cases, in order to avoid risks of circular referencing inside of WP by WP articles themselves. Again, this concerns only a minority of the content on WP articles.

And yes, unsourced information is most of the time useless noise with no value, due to its lack of verifiability. Dozens if not hundred of user edits are reverted everyday for not having a RS to support thair claims (how dare those reverters assume bad faith!). If good faith and verifiability are the same, then why are other people removing unsourced material? And why are those people not blocked for refusing to AGF? Should we not assume that everything that is added on Wikipedia is reliable?

I have no idea what core principles another user refers to, to justify their claim (creativity and the capacity to add bytes to an article are not core principles of WP...).

It have nothing against explaining something in simpler language (as long as the explanation is not OR), this is unrelated to my essay.

Lastly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia: its content is selected, not all information can be put in it (see WP:OR, WP:FRINGE, WP:ONUS, WP:INDISCRIMINATE, WP:NOTBLOG, WP:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought, Reliable sources#Questionable and self-published sources; and the essay Wikipedia:Self-appointed prophet. I highly doubt OR and POV-pushing is "building the web"). And Verifiability, as I already wrote in my essay, is one of the pillars of Wikipedia.

You also discriminate between information you receive: like everyone, you have sources or subjects that you consider as cranky, absurd, or plainly false. You do not value every information esually per se; like everyone, you filter information. I have a hard time believing you give as much credit to an academic paper as to a drunkard you have met in a bar who explains to you why the Earth is flat and why he is the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. Some information, depending on the criteria applied, should not me valued; on Wikipedia, one of the main criteria is verifiability. You have recently removed unsourced material without adding a source to justify your change, yet you thenreverted the person who added back this material (two days after opening this MfD), asking them to not restore it unless and until you can cite reliable medical sources for it. Why not assume good-faith-as-verifiability, why request a source? Was this information you removed not valuable per se?

*However, the BURDEN policy is so rarely enforced, that I would not be surprised if one were to say – in a very learned, proud and peremptory tone – that the 'real' meaning of the policy is something totally opposed to the obvious meaning that someone with common sense would draw from reading it, and that I am wikilawyering while being blinded by my suppositions and biases.

-

However, this is not a well-constructed essay. It contains too many sections, many of which do not flow in a logical order: I am all for some help in organising the essay.

-

as I've quietly observed for a while: did you just confess to stalking? Also, I have no idea why you go off-topic on an MfD discussion, to trash me when I am blocked (and to say "sometimes the user disagrees with the use of a source, and argues", oh what a terrible crime!). You could have told me those things directly. And I have never met user Sundostund so I have no idea what their approval of TheLionHasSeen's argument means. Veverve (talk) 18:07, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

By the way, the 2007 essay Wikipedia:No reliable sources, no verifiability, no article (which still is an essay and has not been moved to the user space!) says substantially what I say in my essay. Veverve (talk) 18:51, 31 May 2023 (UTC)