A chat event on discussion on handling poorly sourced answers and on other things

Question

Namaskar!

As you'll know we have an Official policy for deleting answers that don't cite sources which now also covers an issue of old unsourced answers. While responding to Why aren't unsourced answers getting deleted even though the policy says that they should be?, we have defined some exclusion criterion in which we increased the deadline from 15 days to 30 and introduced two conditions:

1. If a post is partially sourced and partially unsourced, then it may either be kept with post-notice or be fixed by removing the unsourced part if the unsourced claim is crucial.
2. If all answers to a questions are unsourced, then we'll wait until one of them gets improved or until the question gets at least one answer citing sources. Once a question gets an answer citing source, all other unsourced answers will become eligible for deletion with an immediate effect.

Now, there are many answers living on site which are backed up with only weak/poor sources e.g. Wikipedia, articles, blogs etc... Several of them have been flagged for deletion.

In order to come to a conclusion/decision on handling such answers, we, mod team, are scheduling a chat discussion on our main chat-room on upcoming weekend 3-4 October which may get further extended on the next weekend (9-10 Oct). Feel free to drop your inputs on chat-room during an event.

Don't forget to register yourself at chat event

In addition to that we also invite discussion on topics which are important for health, growth and moderation of the site :)

Answer 1

Though very few users have joined/participated in the event, following is idea based on which we'll be taking actions on answers citing weak/poor sources.

(Time limit and exclusion criterion will be as defined here)

• If article/blog/Wikipedia pages which have been cited in an answer, in turn cite any authentic sources e.g. book/scripture than answer is to be fixed/improved by mentioning/citing the original source.

• If article/blog/Wikipedia pages which have been cited in an answer, in turn doesn't cite any authentic or reputed source then it will be considered as an opinion of the blog/article author only and the answer will be deleted considering unauthentic source cited

Note: Analyzing and validating sources may take some effort and time. Consequently flag handling may also take some time. Users are encourage to improve or help in scrutinizing problematic answers. Discussion for the same are welcomed at our chat-room