Also, I would go to the article’s talk page and add a relevant paragraph about your concerns. Often, doing this will produce a response from someone for whom the page is near and dear to their heart.
The person who wrote the offending piece of information (that is, a piece of information that has no citation) has already been the “dick.” You are supposed to provide citations for your work. Asking for a citation is flagging the article so others can know that the citation is needed, which is not dickish in any sense of the word. If you don’t like someone coming along and putting a citation request in an article you wrote, provide the cites like you are supposed to in the first place.
We’ll never agree on this then. If you know some claim is wrong, then you’re obligated to put in the reference to provide the correct information. Adding “cite” without doing so is definitively dickish.
By the way, I always ignore “cite”. I add references, but only where some dick hasn’t added “cite”. No need to make the dicks feel like they are actually accomplishing anything.
And what is the proper course of action if there is no reference available either to contradict the claim or substantiate it? (Or that ‘provides correct information’, if that’s different from contradicting the claim.)
It seems to me that you can’t always prove a negative from a finite authority.
