Information icon Hello, I'm Paul A. I wanted to let you know that I undid one or more of your recent contributions to Khosrow Jamshidi because it did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page.

One of the rules of Wikipedia is that additions to a biographical article must be supported by a reference to a verifiable published source if the addition might be embarrassing or harmful to the subject of the article. This definitely includes announcing that the subject of the article has died, which could be embarrassing or harmful it it's not true. (And we have had cases of people falsely claiming such things, so it's something we need to be cautious of.) If it takes a few days for the death to be officially announced in a known reliable source like a newspaper, so be it; we would rather be behind the news for a few days than spread false news by trying to be too fast. — Paul A (talk) 04:01, 12 September 2014 (UTC)Reply


Verifiability is important to Wikipedia; one of our ideals is for every important detail in an article to be supported by a verifiable source, which means that if readers want to, they can go to the source themselves and confirm that it says what the article claims. For this reason, we prefer publicly available sources like newspapers over private sources like birth certificate or school transcript. (It is presumed that if a person is notable enough to have earned an encyclopedia article, information about them will have been made available in public sources; it is not the place of Wikipedia to make information public that was not public already.)

To learn more about these principles, please read the pages Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:Verifiability. — Paul A (talk) 15:44, 12 September 2014 (UTC)Reply