 | This is a failed proposal. Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump. |
- For an alternative proposal, see Wikipedia:Proposed deletion process for unsourced articles.
Wikipedia now has over 1.5 million articles. The main problem we face has long since shifted from coverage to reliability, accuracy, and neutrality. One of the most important efforts in this regard is referencing all the articles we already have. Unfortunately, this is an impossible task, because we are inundated every day with more and more unreferenced new articles that will languish in that state, while more are created, faster than we are referencing, or likely possibly can reference, existing articles. The fact is that an unreferenced article is not helpful as we do not have any basis for knowing if it is reliable, accurate, and neutral. Even if the information is those things, since it is unverifiable, we (and our readers) have no more reason for trusting the claim than for trusting any of the other bad unsourced claims out there. Unreferenced articles are inherently bad quality.
Keep in mind that:
- "If an article topic has no reputable, reliable, third-party sources, Wikipedia should not have an article on that topic."
- "Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments may only be included in articles if they have already been published by reliable sources."
This proposed addition to the criteria for speedy deletion, then, is merely an extension of current practice and Wikipedia:Verifiability, which states that "Any edit lacking a source may be removed".