User:Satori Son/Verify

Satori's Adventures in New Page Patrolling: Verifiability

Wikipedia:Verifiability has always seemed to be a fairly straightforward policy to me. Here's the gist of it:

The official policy:

Articles should contain only material that has been published by reliable, third-party source with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.
Editors adding new material to an article should cite a reliable source, or it may be challenged or removed by any editor.
The obligation to provide a reliable source lies with the editors wishing to include the material, not on those seeking to remove it.
If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.

Notwithstanding the above, many editors still find the policy challenging. Here are just some of the excuses that editors have given me for why "their" article is exempt from providing references. While, in the interest of civility, names and diffs have been omitted, these examples are all absolutely true.

"Lots of other stubs don't provide sources."
"If you want to verify this, go watch the television show."
"Before I fix this article, you need to go fix the same article at French Wikipedia."
"Articles don't grow on trees. You can't ask for sources this soon after creation."
"Very little has been written about the subject."
"My publicist wrote the article, so they are a primary source."
"I am the subject of the article and can confirm everything here."
"The {unreferenced} tag is longer than the article."
"Just Google it. You'll see it's real."

While some of the articles involved above were not appropriate and have been deleted, others were keepers that could easily have been properly sourced when they were originally written. It's not really that difficult to provide citations for an article with a notable subject.

Examples

Here are some examples of minor articles I have properly sourced. Most of these were brand new, and some of them were up for deletion (not all New Page Patrollers are out to delete every unsourced stub they find). Remember, Google is your friend.