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Hey, want to make a big, public, ego-building contribution to Wikipedia without doing very much work at all? Want to show up other, more hard-working editors with your superior knowledge? It's easy! Just
enforce the rules
and you, too, can do just that! Very little research required, it just gets in the way. And almost no thinking required, a comforting thought if you don't have very much brain to do it.
How about an example? I mean, just suppose that an article on, say, the J/psi meson claimed (accurately as it turns out, but who cares about that) that a common alternative name for it was psion, but didn't give a reference? The rules are clear! Remove it! It's unsourced! QED!
No need to check Google web or Google books. That's work! And worse, they might give some good references (they do as it turns out, hundreds of them) and you might feel morally obliged not to do the edit (you wouldn't of course consider adding one of these references to the article, that's even more work) and miss your moment of glory. Can't have that, can we?
The article was a better article before the alternative name was removed, admittedly. Readers will now come to it looking for the particle called a psion in many, many places in the literature, both historic and recent, and they'll be in the right place and they won't even know. All the information they want will be right there for them, and now they may never find it. But that's not the point. The rules say that you can challenge and remove unsourced material. No mention of doing even the slightest bit of research first (that's work, as I think we said before), is there?
Readers were going to be better off if they did have this accurate information, maybe? Naw, readers are stupid. They might not notice that there's no reference. They might even be misled into thinking that there's a particle called a psion which is the same thing as a J/psi meson, and vice versa! Which there is, as I think we said before, but who cares about that? Anyway, readers are just a nuisance.
And anyway, readers don't want information! Readers are here for Wiikipedia, as edited by big, important, knowledgeable you.
See also
edit- WP:IAR (the policy on this)