Jimmy Wales wrote:
I can NOT emphasize this enough.
There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative "I heard it somewhere" pseudo information is to be tagged with a "needs a cite" tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons.
There are vast swaths of articles on Wikipedia that are completely unsourced right now. While I in no way dispute that this is a bad thing and it needs to be corrected, IMO it'd be a worse thing to simply go around _deleting_ all that stuff. Deleting "unfinished" stuff can often greatly hinder the eventual creation of "finished" stuff. Wikipedia's not done yet.
There are nights where I do nothing but cruise around on random article patrol, doing little bits of tidying on subjects I know nothing about and which I don't care to research in-depth. One of the things I do is add {{citation needed}} when I hit statements that look particularly significant and unsupported, in the hopes that someone who _does_ know about the subject will be prompted to check them and fill in the blanks at some point later on. How is this "wrong"? Seems like perfectly straightforward collaborative editing to me, dividing labor between proofreading and doing the actual problem-fixing work.