User blog:Captainmcpants/Burden of Proof

Citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which an article is based. Citations indicated by a superscript number or other means in a line of text are called inline citations, which is something we could really make use of around here.

But before I suggest that we impose comparitively puritanical rules about verifiability, reliability, reproducibility, research and all those nice things that made Sir Karl Popper's knees go weak, let me explain why I'm bringing this up.

I've noticed that the contents of "Statements needing citations" AKA the Proof Pauper™ seems arbitrary since practically all claims made on the wiki are without citation anyway. I honestly think that page will be put to better use if it lists the claims that DON'T require citation. I rummaged through the help sections for info on citation in wikia, which really just explained technical how-to's - not a single policy defining our standard of truth.

So what exactly constitutes "citation needed"? For example, Cannon makes a claim about its unlisted ability and, understandably, got a "citation needed" tag because there's no link of a video displaying the weapon fire. Compare that to KerBlaster's claim about its unlisted ability (which is very similar to that of the Cannon) and it gets off scott free. Is it just me or does it look like the only claims that actually require proof around here are the variant charts?