TheAscender

Unreferenced BLPs

Hello TheAscender! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot notifying you on behalf of the the unreferenced biographies team that 1 of the articles that you created is currently tagged as an Unreferenced Biography of a Living Person. The biographies of living persons policy requires that all personal or potentially controversial information be sourced. In addition, to ensure verifiability, all biographies should be based on reliable sources. If you were to bring this article up to standards, it would greatly help us with the current 0 article backlog. Once the article is adequately referenced, please remove the {{unreferencedBLP}} tag. Here is the article:

1. Matthew Stewart (philosopher) - Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 09:23, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Removal of references

Please don't go removing references, as you did at the woolsack article, just because the links are dead. You left the article without any references, as if someone had just made the whole thing up. We do not require links to be functioning, otherwise we wouldn't be able to reference print sources, after all. Please review Wikipedia:Link rot. Removing references from Wikipedia is really an immensely damaging thing to do to the project and I can't understand why you thought it was a sensible decision. Beorhtwulf (talk) 17:20, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

In reply to your message on my talk page, there are bots and other efforts ongoing to ensure that dead links are still able to function, through replacement with links to archive.org, for example. Even if these don't cover all bases I would much rather see a factual assertion referenced to a source that can't be accessed than go totally unsourced, especially since whoever originally put it in went to the trouble of citing their source. Readers might for example look at the domain name to see what kind of website the information came from, or they might follow a link, find it's 404'd because the site has been reorganised, and no one took the time to create redirects, but the information is still there if they search for it within the new site structure. In general it just seems like a really bad idea to lose information from the encyclopedia, like if we started deleting revisions from pages' edit histories to save space. Beorhtwulf (talk) 21:51, 8 March 2017 (UTC)