Unverified Claims Policy Proposal

Over in Ask the Tropers thread, I proposed a rule about people making unverified claims without an external source, particularly about examples applying to real life, such as "one newspaper said". I'm afraid such allowance of unverified claims will make it easy for people to post deceptive information here.

I would like the rule in which if the example cannot be verified by common knowledge or knowledge of the work, it has to be verified with an external website or else it'll be deleted. If one user has a memory of "one newspaper", but cannot remember what the newspaper is, they can post it on a cleanup thread and have others try to find what it is.

We have a longstanding policy of not requiring precise citations for factual claims. We've only made exceptions in a few cases, such as Unfortunate Implications, due to persistent misuse. You need more than vague assertions to support a change.

We could start a cleanup thread for requesting IRL trivia verification for a given example.

Edited by Albert3105 on Mar 8th 2020 at 9:40:52 AM

Our primary guideline is that examples should be verifiable, not cited. Verifiable means that someone could, in principle, find information to back up a factual claim. In the case of normal tropes, that source would be the work itself. For Trivia, the example should ideally say something like, "In a televised interview on Fox in 2019, Joe Wilson said X..." or, "In a 2016 blog post, Sarah Grimes said Y...".

External links are fine of course but not required. The point is that a person should have enough to go on to independently confirm that the claim is true.

But shouldn't there be a mention of which source it is, instead of something like "in a news article"? There can be many articles for a person, and someone could easily add a fake one under such guise.

An example of an "unverified claim" would be "A Norwegian TV channel took this Up To Eleven by describing all animated features as Disney movies." on All Animation Is Disney. Which Norwegian TV channel? Is it a specific program? It's too broad.

Here's a rule of thumb I'd like to propose, "To be verifiable, and the source is the work itself, the person is experienced with the work and knows it. If not, the person can Google search the information provided and get the source easily in the results."

Edited by PrincessPandaTrope on Mar 8th 2020 at 12:51:25 PM

That is indeed a little too vague, and it's perfectly fine to remove such examples if no source can be identified.

At ATT, Rjd had suggested a cleanup thread for unverifiable information, which I think would work well- instead of preemptively requiring a citation everywhere, we would be on the lookout for information that should be cited in some way and fix it up.

Seems perfectly fine. Do it.

Sweet; I'll ping ~Tropers/rjd1992 and ask directly: Do you want to create the thread you proposed yourself?

Edit: Well, I would if I didn't screw up the ping... before I double post, anyone else want to lend a hand?

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 8th 2020 at 7:28:46 AM

~rjd1992