Forgotten Realms Wiki talk:Disallow unsourced edits from anonymous users

Policy reasoning
I think it's time. There are nearly 7000 articles, and these could be split into well-referenced, poorly-referenced and not referenced piles. The well-referenced pile would be tiny, if we were to make such a pile. The wiki started out small, and the focus was on adding information right, left and centre until a decent wealth of it was present. I believe we have now achieved this.

I automatically dislike any additions to the wiki that are unsourced. You can't tell if an unsourced statement is true or not, and critics of the wiki have been fast to point out that as a whole, it is unreliable. They're right. This is why I want to propose reverting any changes to the wiki made by anonymous users that add information without a source.

I'm not proposing we prevent anonymous users from editing: they provide a useful source of typo and spelling corrections on a regular basis, but without the ability to go back and let a user know that some information needs a source (i.e. a registered account) we are accepting more and more new unsourced information every day. No doubt some of this is correct, but no matter how correct something is, with no reference, there can be no way of knowing that it is correct, and it is not the regular editors' job to go back and cite all unsourced statements.

To be clear: I am not suggesting we remove all unsourced information from the wiki, nor am I suggesting we stop the addition of unsourced information from registered users (although I believe a time will come for that); this proposal affects only unsourced additions from unregistered users, whether or not the added information is correct. Fw190a8 (talk &middot; contr) 17:56, October 8, 2009 (UTC)