Wikipedia talk:Articles with a single source

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illustration of the roman senate?

Surely that is rather an odd illustration to pick given the POV reflected in this essay? Isn't a government chamber precisely the sort of place a statement will be judged by the repute of the person making it? If that one person is respected then the statement will be accepted. If not, then it is liable to be rejected. Is that the model you are arguing for on wiki? Sandpiper (talk) 18:09, 9 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Softened claims regarding original research

Interesting essay, hope my changes will help. I softened some claims that unsourced information must be original research. The alternative is that the information exists in reliable sources, but the editor(s) who put that information in the article did not bother citing sources – perhaps out of ignorance of wiki policy or because they believed their edits were so uncontroversial they were unlikely to be challenged. Baileypalblue (talk) 19:55, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

comments

Reference lists aren't really a stated goal of WP, but they nonetheless are widely reported as one of its primary assets (through which WP is widely used as a jumping board for further research on any topic, esp. in schools & academia), so a single source inherently makes the article or section less useful to readers.

Maintenance: it is generally much more difficult to verify (since any readers who happen not to have access to that one particular source are left with absolutely no alternative leads to try to corroborate with), and it doesn't help collaborating editors search for further information for improving or expanding WP's coverage of the topic.

Over-reliance on a single source tends frequently to be a signal indicating that no additional sources exist (and often the first source is already obscure). Such circumstances do lead to the undesirable outcome that the article content alternates between original research and substantially-similar-derivative-of-one-source. Furthermore, the absence of additional independent sources makes it impossible to recognise which are the areas where the first source is incomplete, mistaken, biased, outdated, whatever. It is difficult to imagine that much content satisfying the WP community standards could ever be written on any topic for which multiple sources doesn't exist.

Cesiumfrog (talk) 03:01, 9 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]