User talk:Bearfeeder

A few things...

Hey, Bearfeeder, welcome to Wikipedia! I just wanted to let you know a few things. First, my nomination of the article for deletion wasn't personal in any way; I don't know the guy, and I have nothing against him. Second, I'm not sure why you would say it's hassling him. The article isn't really for him, it's for readers. It certainly doesn't belong to him or anything like that. Third, the discussion is moving towards keep (I've already changed my implicit !vote to keep).

But the most important thing I'd have to say is a few things about verifiability. It's unfortunate that (assuming your claims are true, which they certainly might be) someone that's important might not have coverage in reliable sources, but it really can't change how we work. Wikipedia works on reliable sources. All of the material within Wikipedia needs to be verifiable through citations to reliable sources. Not everything has to be actually cited directly, of course, but if any piece of information were to be challenged, there should be a reliable source that can then be used to cite it. This is important because verifiability is the only means by which we can be at all sure that the material we provide is correct. We can't take original research or other unsourced statements, because we have no way to tell whether they're accurate, even if they are accurate. I mean, the old saying goes that on the Internet, nobody can tell that you're a dog. We can never tell who's putting stuff up on Wikipedia, so we can never just take people's word for it. After all, how do we know that they're not just some crazy person who's completely making things up? Even if they say they have three related PhDs, we have no way to know whether that's true. Please note that I'm not implying that you're making stuff up; in the absence of reliable sources, I have no idea and no opinion whether you are or not. And that's the problem.

Obviously, as a user-generated site, there are going to be articles for which this isn't true, but that's a flaw in those articles, and it shouldn't be used as justification to perpetuate the flaw. This kind of argument is one we see all-too-often, but it really doesn't hold water. We know that Wikipedia isn't perfect; all we can do is what we can on the issues that we see in front of us. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 15:17, 2 October 2012 (UTC)