Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Question about statement without citations

Another question here: "What kinds of statements in a Wikipedia article do not necessarily need to be cited? It's obvious that not all statements need to be cited."

Like I said, ideally we would want everything to be cited, because we want to feel that you're not just telling us things that you made up. But, if you're describing, say, the early childhood of a person, and you want to say that they struggled in school, or they struggled with math in school, or whatever, it's not a very important fact in the biography of most people. So you may want to just mention it, and maybe you don't have a great source for it.

But on the other hand, how do you know? Were you there? Are you a classmate of this person? Probably not. So you know this because this person said so in an interview? Probably. Or there was an interview with this person's, say, parent, or with that person's teacher, and they said that in an interview.

Otherwise, how do you know that they struggled with math in school? So there is a source, even if that source is a bit indirect. Theoretically, you should cite that source. You should say, "according to his teacher, Mr. Smith, Mr. X struggled with math in elementary school." And you can cite the interview where the teacher, Mr. Smith, says that.

So in principle, everything should be cited; again in practice, people do write things -- maybe you're writing an article about your village, your home village, and you have citations for some things and for some things you don't, but "everybody in the village knows", right? "Everybody knows". Maybe you've been told this since childhood, though you don't really have an interview, or a written source to cite, but you and everybody else in the village agree that, say, in the 1980s there was a big green building that collapsed in a fire. And there's no source to prove it, but it's lived experience for all of you. I would say that that's the kind of sentence that you can include in the article without a source, because it is not an extraordinary statement -- you're not claiming this village is "the biggest village", you're not making an outlandish claim, you're not making a high-stakes claim. It is, after all, a fact that is of very little interest to anyone who isn't from that village, or otherwise interested in it -- the fact that there used to be a big green building, and that at some point it burned down. It's not a controversial fact, and it is unlikely to be challenged by anyone.

So you can mention it without a source. Worst case, someone one day will come along and say, "hmm, where is the source for that fire, for that burnt building?", and put a "citation needed" tag on that sentence, challenging you to find a citation for it. And if after a while no citation is provided, that sentence about the building that was burnt may even get removed from the article. Possibly. Because we don't want to include information that isn't true.

I can tell you that even though, according to the rules, after a week without citations being provided, once citations have been asked for, anyone can remove the content, in practice, and you can check for yourself, Wikipedia is full of "citation needed" tags that have been around for years, not immediately removed.

And the reason they are allowed to remain there is that people are reading a sentence like this, that there used to be a building in this village and it burnt in a fire -- if I read it, and I'm not from that village, I don't know if there was or wasn't such a building, but I tend to believe that there probably was; it doesn't sound like a lie that would be profitable for someone to write. So, I can understand how that would be, at the same time, something "everybody knows", but also something difficult to establish with a source -- so I'm willing to let it be there, with a "citation needed" tag, which tells the reader "this information doesn't actually have a source! Someone put it here, but we don't have a citation for it!" So it has a little warning LED next to it. Citation needed! We don't have a source for this! And then the reader is at least warned that, unlike most of the content on Wikipedia, this particular sentence is offered without a source.

So that's what I mean by "some things you could get away with saying on Wikipedia without a source" -- if they are not seen to be manipulative, promotional, high stakes, etc. even though ideally even they should have a source. But sometimes you just have no source.