User talk:91.84.6.9

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Thank you for experimenting with the page User talk:Gwernol on Wikipedia. Your test worked, and it has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you may want to do. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. A link to the edit I have reverted can be found here: link. If you believe this edit should not have been reverted, please contact me. ≈ The Haunted Angel (The Forest Whispers My Name) 21:56, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Venture Capital

The problem with the text was it was entirely unsourced, meaning it cannot be verified by readers. Verifiability is one of the key policies of Wikipedia; as the policy says "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth" (emphasis in the original). In other words, even if it is true, unless you can cite reliable sources for the what was in the article, it cannot be included. If you can find and cite appropriate sources then please go ahead and add the material back into the article. Thanks, Gwernol 22:00, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] With respect, your response is unpersuasive

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I would however strongly urge you to look more closely at the issue and to reconsider your view. I fear you may have made an error of judgment in this case albeit I am sure with the best of intentions.

If I may, I would make the following specific points in response to your reply.

Firstly, none of the rest of the page cites any sources, so I fear you may be misapplying the verifiability standard. Holding the same standard to the rest of the page and pursuing the same course of action would result in the rest of the page being deleted as well.

Secondly, most pages in Wikipedia cite sources only sporadically, except in cases where the subject matter is controversial, abstruse, and/or has been (or is likely to be) challenged through debate. I offer you, by way of example, the Wikipedia entry on 'Wikipedia' which contains in its second paragaph the following sentences with no citation:

Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002.

As I say, the cited source for the paragraph makes no reference any of these factual claims.

The verifiability criterion should surely be employed just as it should in the case of any good scholarly article: precisely in those cases when a reasonable reader might wish to enquire further, challenge assumptions, or doubt statements of fact that are presented.

I fear one could spend many an hour deleting 'uncited' but widely accepted claims from Wikipedia. In so doing one could horribly impair its value as a tool of broad, if on occasion exciteable, knowledge.

Thirdly, should one wish to request that sources be cited, given the material was of long-standing, I was of the understanding that the appropriate way to do this was to add "the {{Fact}} template, or tag the article by adding {{Not verified}} or {{Unreferenced}}" or at the very least to move the material to the talk page, rather than simply deleting the material wholesale and without any reference to having done so in the notes accompanying the edit.

Fourthly, citing sources is surely inessential in cases where the entry is making obvious, uncontroversial and generally accepted claims, as the large majority of the text you deleted did. It would -- for instance -- be quite unreasonable to insist that sources be cited for a statement of plain fact such as 'a bank lends money'.

Fifthly, and in a related vein, it is entirely unclear what could possibly constitute 'evidence' or 'source' material for a paragraph such as the following [simply the first in the large section of text you deleted] which plainly relates generally established, entirely uncontroversial matters of fact about the venture capital industry, standard terminology used within it, and so forth.

Venture capital general partners (also known as "venture capitalists" or "VCs") may be former chief executives at firms similar to those which the partnership funds. Investors in venture capital funds (limited partners) are typically large institutions with large amounts of available capital, such as state and private pension funds, university endowments, insurance companies, and pooled investment vehicles.

As I say, I would urge you in light of these considerations to rethink whether deleting these paragraphs wholesale is the right action in this particular case.

Well I didn't in fact remove the text. If you look at this diff it shows that the text was in fact removed by [[User:88.108.183.37]. I suggest you pursue the matter with that user. Sorry I didn't recall this at first but that was 2 months and nearly 10,000 edits ago for me. You can always add the text back if you want to include it. Gwernol 23:56, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply. I will do my best to add back an acceptable version of the deleted text. --91.84.6.9 00:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC)