Ccapeson

February 2012

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Karen Levine

I'm not the one who changed anything — your edit was undone by somebody else, not by me. But since I'm one of the administrators here, and dispute resolution is part of my job, I can still speak to it a bit anyway.

The thing is, one of our key principles on Wikipedia is that we always have to be able to independently verify the information in our articles — which means that we have to follow the sources. We understand that there are sources out there which get stuff wrong sometimes, because those sources were also written by humans just the same as we are, but we can't just accept an unverified assertion that the sources are wrong if there aren't any alternative sources for the corrected information. I know it may seem like something nobody would ever do, but we actually have to deal with people adding wrong information to our articles all the time — I don't know if you're familiar with the musician Hayden, but about a decade ago we had a huge problem that went on for months with somebody who kept editing the article to claim that he had died. He hadn't, and we reverted it right away, but the hoaxer kept coming back to say that he was dead again. We reverted again, they came back again, lather, rinse, repeat. This actually ended up impacting Hayden personally.

We obviously want our information to be accurate, but that's an example of why we can't just take people's word for "but all of the existing sources are wrong, here's the truth even though I can't show a source for it". Even if the existing information is wrong, we actually need to see a source for the corrected information before we can accept it, because people adding false or inaccurate or even defamatory information to our articles really happens on here a lot more often than you might think. Even her own published information about herself would be an acceptable source for where she was born, if she has a website or were to publish an autobiography, but we still have to see an actual source before we could contradict the existing sources.

That said, the thing we can do, if there's reason to believe that existing sources are wrong but we can't find a source to say something different, is to just take the disputed information out of the article entirely, and just not say anything about it at all. We run into this a lot, for example, when it comes to people's birthdates — sources are wrong about that a lot, sometimes even in ways that aren't credible at all because they clearly contradict other known information. In cases like that, we just don't say anything about their birthdate at all until we can find a source to support the more credible information.

Accordingly, if you can't show an actual source to support that Karen Levine was born in Toronto rather than Ottawa, what I can do is just take the statement that she was born in Ottawa out of the article entirely. Bearcat (talk) 15:07, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for removing the incorrect information. Ccapeson (talk) 19:43, 25 October 2019 (UTC)