Jump to content

User talk:Johannes Schade

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by PBS (talk | contribs) at 13:20, 25 October 2022 (→‎Claud Hamilton, 1st Lord Paisley article: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Adolf von Deines

Hello! I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to guide me through the GAN process for this article. I've contributed piecemeal to wikipedia over the years, but 2022 was the first time I've actually created and taken the time to edit, source and curate articles. It has been a labor of love, and the assistance of experienced editors has been beyond value. I speak very little German, so I have spent many hours sitting with a source on my screen or my knee, and a German dictionary or translation site on the other, piecing together sometimes garbled paragraphs. I hope that my responses to your posts on the review page are appropriate and correct, I wasn't sure how to let you know I'd read and edited accordingly. - Evansknight (talk) 18:30, 6 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Evansknight. Thanks for your kind message. You are doing fine. I am not very good at guiding because I myself lack experience. The normal way to let me know that you have read my remark and edited accordingly is to indent and write "Done". You can e.g. look how the User Edwininlondon has reacted to my remarks in the review "Talk:Betsy Bakker-Nort/GA1". Of course sometimes my remarks or suggestions are not well-founded and you can refuse. All you need for GA is to complay with the criteria. With thanks and best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 08:32, 7 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Your GA nomination of Charles MacCarthy, 1st Viscount Muskerry

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Charles MacCarthy, 1st Viscount Muskerry you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Edwininlondon -- Edwininlondon (talk) 09:22, 16 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Your GA nomination of Charles MacCarthy, 1st Viscount Muskerry

The article Charles MacCarthy, 1st Viscount Muskerry you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:Charles MacCarthy, 1st Viscount Muskerry for comments about the article. Well done! If the article has not already appeared on the main page as a "Did you know" item, or as a bold link under "In the News" or in the "On This Day" prose section, you can nominate it within the next seven days to appear in DYK. Bolded names with dates listed at the bottom of the "On This Day" column do not affect DYK eligibility. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Edwininlondon -- Edwininlondon (talk) 21:02, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A beer for you!

Many thanks, Denisarona (talk) 13:57, 13 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dates

Hi, thanks for the tip, have fixed the quotation errors. A curious question for you: I notuced that often you use e.g. 20 May 1689 ( with & n b s p ; ) instead of 20 May 1689. Is there a particular reason? Regards Denisarona (talk) 08:37, 19 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Denisarona. Thank you for your quick reaction. It was indeed so quick that I had written you another remark about the non-breaking space in the meantime. I looked up in the MOS and there is MOS:NBSP which suggests (but does not prescribe) the use of nbsp between the date and the month, saying "It is sometimes desirable ...". However, I think that means you should not delete nbsps used in reasonable way such as between the date and the month. Best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 08:53, 19 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's just that I don't understand the reason for using MOS:NBSP when the normal use is perfectly ok, especially when both are used in different sections of an article. Regards Denisarona (talk) 09:16, 19 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Dear Denisarona. You have of course much more experience with the MOS than I have, but with regard to non-breaking spaces betwen the day and the month in a date, I would interpret the MOS to recommend the use of nbsp over the ordinary space in all locations where an end of line (i.e. a carriage returns) might occur between the date and the month. This is essentially everywhere in the lead and sections of an article, but not in the infobox and possibly neither in tables nor captions. I would think it should be used consistently in an article. However, it seems there are users that do not want nbsps in "their" articles. Best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 09:41, 19 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Recommend WP:Twinkle

Hi, I noticed your question about formatting a proposal for deletion (prod) on Dianaa's talk page. I think you'll find the tool WP:TWINKLE helpful. It adds a TW menu to the top of pages. In the menu, there are options for nominating for speedy deletion (CSD), prod, AFD, as well as to apply different tags or request page protection. For users, the menu lets you welcome or warn the user, or report them for vandalism, edit-warring, or sock-puppetry. Give it a try! Schazjmd (talk) 14:41, 25 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin

See the section WP:FREECOPYING in guideline WP:Plagarism. There is a absolutely no prohibition on using copying copyright expired text into a Wikipedia article, providing proper attribution is used. Indeed paraphrasing it is more likely to breach the WP:Plagarism guideline if the required attribution is not added.

The issue of citations to the secondary source is coverd by WP:SAYWHEREYOUREADIT.

"Since all editors freely license their work to the public, no editor owns an article and any contributions can and may be mercilessly edited and redistributed." (WP:MERCILESS).

I hope that helps. Don't hesitate if you need more advise". -- PBS (talk) 19:27, 3 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Your talk page is quite big. I suggest you set up archiving (WP:AUTOARCHIVE) — PBS (talk) 19:31, 3 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Dear PBS. I see you are busy with some good work on Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin.—You have a good point saying that a verbatim copy-paste, adequately attributed, is surer than a paraphrasing that might be judged too close or does simply not reach the quality of English that the original had. According to WP:PLAG it seems to be good enough to place a single attribution tag at the bottom under the sources and before the succession box, but articles even when started with a simple copy-paste of a public-domain source, can quickly evolve into a mosaic of remains of the original copy, interspersed with pieces of text added by various Wikipedians. Should not in such cases the attribution also evolve reflect the actual state of the text? Should not inline attribution tags (e.g. {{DNB|inline=1}}) be used to mark the surviving pieces of the original copy-past? Or could it be considered that inline citations suffiently mark the pieces that are not from the original text? Inline attribution tags seem to be rarely used. This can become quickly difficult to maintain and understand and there might be a point when it becomes better to lose the last verbatim fragments and remove the attribution? With best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 15:43, 5 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ah you see the complexity. You have to understand that the WP:PLAGIARISM guideline evolved because editors like the late user:SlimVirgin were firmly against copying copyright expired text and other "free source text" into Wikipedia article. I and others thought it a very good way of getting high quality text into Wikipedia quickly. So the Plagiarism guideline is a compromise. It makes sure that any text copied in is highlighted as a copy. There are projects dedicated to this, and lots of such templates see examples in user:PBS/Notes#List of PD Templates

The two projects I have been most involved in are:

Basically the way it works is that if a lot of text is copied the it is usually best to place one attribution at the bottom and link it as I have done in Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin. The way to get around the problem you have described is like this:

Mary had a little lamb and every where Mary went it was sure to go.<ref>Chisholm 1911, p.35.</ref>

==References==

Attribution

  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Sheep". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 18 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 34.

If someone adds in new text and a new fact

Mary had a little lamb,<ref name="Chisholm 1911, p.35">Chisholm 1911, p.35.</ref> it was blue,<ref>Smith 2010, p.100</ref> and every where Mary went it was sure to go.<ref name="Chisholm 1911, p.35"/>

==References==

  • Smith, John, 2019, "A Modern guide to shepherding", Reliable Publisher....

Attribution

This is no different from any other insertion. Often it is necessary to update the language in EB1911 and DNB even if the facts are right, because the 100+ year old Victorian/Edwardian text is rather old fashioned. It does not hurt to leave the Attribution in place, but it does hurt if it is removed when there is a high correlation with the original text. There is a tool to help decide when it is appropriate:

As you can see in Example 2 there is a match but it is decreasing as time goes by and the match is now only needed for a couple of paragraphs.

The DBN may be updated with information from the 21st century ODNB. Often all they did was copy the old article and amend it with modern facts, but occasionally they completely rewrote the original. It is however a very useful check to see if the information in the old DNB article is still up to date even if the style has dated.

-- PBS (talk) 16:44, 5 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear PBS. You explain very well. You have a gift for teaching. I see how your method of distinguishing the various origins is used in John Woodward (naturalist). I tried Earwick and found that the URL comparison works with Wikisource but fails with Internet archive, e.g. https://archive.org/stream/dictionaryofnati41stepuoft/ for Inchiquin. Do you understand why? That is in fact very bad news for me as a high percentage of my sources usually are found in Internet Archive. Interesting to talk to you. Thanks and best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 20:20, 5 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You flatter me. My family consider me to be a terrible teacher! Forget the Internet Archive for DNB, because the full source is on Wikisource. The link you gave will not have worked because you linked to the main page you would have to go to the full text https://archive.org/stream/dictionaryofnati41stepuoft/dictionaryofnati41stepuoft_djvu.txt but that is basically the source for what appears on Wikisource.
Those are three of the major ones, but there are a lot of others best to follow the links in the templates in the links in the section in my notes (List of PD Templates -- I fixed the link to the same section above). Sometimes before you copy text from Wikisource into Wikipedia, you need to edit the pages on Wikisource first to clean up the pages due to OCR (optical character recognition) errors. There are also the Wikipedia Projects which cover some of the other Wikisource to Wikipedia work, with other editors go give advise. BTW, although I have not looked at it for some time, you may find some of the links in my library useful (User:PBS/Library).
--PBS (talk) 08:23, 6 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Dear PBS. I have made another edit on the article Donogh O'Brien, 4th Earl of Thomond trying to add inline attributions correctly. I inspired myself from how it is done in John Woodward (naturalist). The article has now several citation footnotes and one attribution footnote, numbered [20], used several times and appearing in the middle of the citation footnotes. Accordingly I changed the header from "Citations" to "Citations and attribution". That looks a bit strange. Perhaps, I should rather have used the method you showed in "Mary had a little lamb" above, but that does use citation footnotes everywhere, even for the parts that have been copy-pasted vertatim. The difference between citation and attribution seems to be lost. This seems also to be what you do in in Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin. Perhaps I should have defined a special footnote group for the attributions. Thanks and best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 18:45, 6 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I modified the section headers to remove the word "Attribution" because the bold Attribution is only there as a flag to appease those who claimed that copying text from a source was plagarism. To counter that it was argued that placing the sources from which text was copied at the end of the list of references with a clear statement that text is copied from a source donates clearly that Wikipedia is not hiding the fact that text is copied and gives credit where credit is due (and so no plagiarism). If the arguments for and against interests you there are the archives of them below Wikipedia talk:Plagiarism where this issue was throughly aired.
Dear PBS. I have edited Donogh O'Brien, 4th Earl of Thomond again using a group, and have written a comment on the talk page of that article. I wonder what you think about it. Sorry, I was busy with real life yesterday and today. Greetings, Johannes Schade (talk) 20:12, 8 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I think it was an error to call the templates "reflist" and "notelist" by those names because they are misleading. The section heading "Notes" is a shortened form of "Footnotes" and inline citations are a form of footnote, because if you look in a book numbered citations in text either appear as a footnote at the bottom of the page along with other footnotes or in an endnote section.
Dear PBS. Perhaps. I have never had problems to understand what they mean. Greetings, Johannes Schade (talk) 20:12, 9 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Likewise editors misuse {{Refbegin}} it was never intended to be used with bullet pointed lists of refrences it was intended in the early days for roll your own lists of inline references. Using {{Refbegin}} on a list of bullet pointed refrences means that their size is deminished compared to the "External links" section, implying to the casual reader that external links are more notable than references!
Dear PBS. I struggle to follow. What do you mean with "roll your own list?" Like probably most of the editors now active, I was not around in the early days. Johannes Schade (talk) 20:12, 9 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I prefer the section heading containinga list of references used in an article to be "References" not "Sources" to clearly deliniate them from the "Further reading" section. The reason for this is that some people with a commersial intrest in selling a book will try to sneak books into the References/Sources section in the hope that a reader of the Wikipedia article may buy the book and unless as an editor places User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js in User:Johannes Schade/common.js as I see you have, such entries can be hard to spot.
The reason why I prefer "References" to "Sources" is because in culinary related articles sources has another possible meaning. Likewise "Bibliography" can mean list of books written by an the subject of a biography rather than a list of references about the subject. So IMHO it is best not to use "Sources" or "Bibliography" as standard appendix section headers in Wikipedia articles. If like me you run AWB you come to appreciate this issue.
Dear PBS. I struggle to follow. Culinary? Sources are not sauces. The problem with references is that WP:CITE uses citations, references, and source almost interchangeably. I do not understand your remark about AWB, which seems to be important. I do in fact use AWB but only to make searches on the articles in my watchlist, pratically never to edit. Johannes Schade (talk) 20:12, 9 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
In my opinion placing the section headers for footnotes and referece lists inside a wrapper section heading is uneccery and just clutters the Table Of Contents (TOC).
-- PBS (talk) 08:19, 7 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Surely it is not necessary, but when flat TOCs get long (perhaps beyond about 7 entries) they are not nice to read. Introducing some structure makes long TOCs more readable (so I believe) Johannes Schade (talk) 20:12, 9 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I would not use the attribution template in both the inline section and the bullet pointed references section because it becomes very bloated as the number of pages goes up (eg Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Thomond). So personally if I use long inline citations in an article then the "Reference" section will contain just the {{reflist}} with no other other bullet pointed list, so the attribution prescript is placed in the inline reference. If I use short inline citations then I place the attribution at the bottom of bullet pointed list of long citations. Ocasionally the inline citations are a mixture of inline long citation first mention followed by inline short citations, in which case I would place the attribution prescript before the initial inline long citation. -- PBS (talk) 08:52, 7 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Dear PBS I am not so sure I understand. Wikipedia's citation terminology seems to be so muddled up. I feel WP:PLAG quite clearly prescribes "an attribution template in a footnote at the end of the sentences or paragraph". This seems to be often ignored, but it is part of the guideline. I am learning so much from you. With many thanks and greetings, Johannes Schade (talk) 20:12, 9 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My mistake on sauces (spelling is not my strong point). AWB allows complicated regular expressions to be entered. The more section header options people use the more complicated the syntas can become and the easier it is to make a mistake. Not only do regular expressions work in AWB they can also e used in the search bar eg

Don't worry about roll your own inline citations that was 15+ years ago, but using {{Refbegin}} infront of a bullet pointed long references is in my opinion silly as it causes "external links" to appear bigger and more important than "references".

As for WP:PLAGIARISM see the start of the two relevant paragraphs:

  • "but there is a paragraph or a few sentences copied from compatibly licensed or public-domain text which is not placed within quotations, then putting an attribution template in a footnote at the end of the sentences or paragraph is sufficient.
  • If a significant proportion of the text is copied or closely paraphrased from a compatibly-licensed or public domain souce, attribution is generally provided either through the use of an appropriate attribution template, or a general attribution template ... placed in a "References section" near the bottom of the page. In such cases consider adding the attribution statements at the end of the Reference section directly under a line consisting of Attribution:

My emphasis. — PBS (talk) 20:57, 9 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Congratulations from the Military History Project

 Military history reviewers' award 
On behalf of the Military History Project, I am proud to present the The Milhist reviewing award (1 stripe) for participating in 1 review between April and June 2022. Peacemaker67 (talk) via MilHistBot (talk) 07:16, 10 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep track of upcoming reviews. Just copy and paste {{WPMILHIST Review alerts}} to your user space

Date change

 Done Regards Denisarona (talk) 09:52, 11 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

The Editor's Barnstar
For your work in improving articles on historical topics. Kj cheetham (talk) 11:20, 18 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

More on Attribution as required by the Plagiarism guideline

Dear PBS. Thank you for the amazing patience you had with me. You practically taught me all I know about the subject. I am thankful for that. I have not ignored your explanations in the whole of this thread but have come quite a way from my initial misunderstanding (I thought that verbatim borrowings even from PD sources were unwelcome, except in quotions or indirect speech ("in-text attributions"), then my first misunderstood approach to attribution (inline attributions separate from the citations using {{DNB}} displayed in a separate section called "Attributions"), to my latest approach using the "ordinary" citations (i.e. {{Sfn}}) with an attribution postscript {{PD-notice}}, which I discovered only today and is much better than what I had invented.
A crucial question probably is in which cases WP:PLAG prescribes, tolerates, or forbids the use of inline attributions in addition to the general end-of-referenc-section attribution notice for unquoted borrowed text passages. I would expect it allows it in the present case. Just like WP:V seems to accept general references only for early-stage articles and expects in-line citations for more advanced ones, so does WP:PLAG. Under "A practice preferred by some" WP:PLAG says "specifically mention the section requiring attribution" and "In a way unambiguously indicating exactly what has been copied verbatim". The next question then would be which form the in-line attribution should take. WP:PLAG mentions {{Citation-attribution}}, which probably remains enigmatic for most readers. {{DNB|inline=1...}} seems to implement {{Citation-attribution}}. I find WP:PLAG difficult to read. It seems always to say "this but also that" due to the history of the finding a consensus between you and some other editors such as Franamax and SlimVirgin (both deceased). It sometimes also uses terminology that is perhaps not common knowledge. I had difficulties to grasp that "inline" and "in-text" attribution is not the same and that "in-test attribution" means by indirect speech. The articles mentioned as examples do not seem to be particularly well-chosen. Do you think there would be a chance for straightening WP:PLAG out and make it a bit more prescriptive?
The same source and even the same passage in the source might be sometimes be cited verbatim and sometimes summarised. The citations that also serve as inline attributions must be distinguishable from the ordinary ones. I still feel that it is helpful to give column and line so that the reader has a better chance to find the borrowed passages in the source within reasonable time. I do not think it is fair to cover all in a general attribution alone and let the reader who is worried about possible plagiarism (probably a GA or FA reviewer) err around in the text trying to find the relevant locations. GA criterion 2d and FA criterion 1f require the reviewer to check for plagiarism and will have to discount the ones that have been attributed and point out the remaining ones to the nominator. These GA and FA nominations are often quite long articles and have hundreds of citations as you know well.
My use of footquotes WP:FOOTQUOTE in the ordinary citations is a separate topic, which we should perhaps discuss in a different thread. You are not the only one to criticise me in that regard.
I am not so sure I understand the sentence above the table "There is also a problem ...". Concerning the second row of the table, you rightly point out that the given citation does not entirely cover the given information. Either another citation must be added or the given one must be replaced with a better one as you propose. It is one of the advantages of the footquotes that it makes it much easier to find such shortcomings. The article is rated C, perhaps somewhat generously. I agree also with your warning against an apprach that is too genealogical. I often fall into this trap because many historical biographies are of noblemen for which genealogical sources, always the same, are readily available. With many thanks and best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 21:14, 18 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Apart from too many instances of inline attribution "There is also a problem" to do with quoting something that the reader can easily check themselves by looking at the sources. In the second example there is a further problem of {{failed verification}}. I think you misunderstand my offering a second source. As Wikipedia often summarises several sources simultaneously you probably need two or three sources for that sentence whether in their own ref..tag pair or bundled into one). However in the instance as I noted in the table, I would remove the second half of the text in the sentence (rather than adding citations to support it), because it can be found via the link Henry. This is the difference between a biography and a genealogy. Modern biographies in works such as the ODNB usually do not mention children unless they are notable (ie have their own biography in the ODNB), or appear naturally in the text as a notable event (eg who inherits the title), and they do not detail their genealogy in the main subject's biography. In Wikipedia's case because some people are interested in genealogy, it is usually considered acceptable to give a one sentence summary of a non-notable child. This is particularly useful for daughters because thanks to European society before the 20th century they often are not notable enough in history to warrant an separate biographical article, but their marriages into other notable families can help someone understand the politics of powerful dynasties, both at the country and country level in part through family ties.
As it happens I have been working on the DNB articles with broken links thanks some editors replacing dash with ndash within the dab extensions of some Wikisource DNB articles. These are two articles were I cleaned up the sources and work as examples
  1. James Howard, 3rd Earl of Suffolk — inline short citations with the attribution before the long citation in the references section.
  2. George Birkbeck Hill — attribution before the inline long citations (in this case for EB1911 but it demonstrates the point).
So I would argue that:
  • The first example works better because it is referencing multiple pages in the original references, which is why short and long citations are usually used. If someone is really interested in the citations then they will see the attribution in the references section. It helps keep the inline citations short which makes editing the text much easier, and presents the inline citations in a clean way in multiple columns.
  • In the second example, the EB1911 is only one page long so it fits in neatly with the other inline long citations and cleans up the Appendix sections
  • In the second example if the EB1911 was multiple pages long then as the style already developed was for inline long citations citations, a solution is to keep the first citation to EB1911 long with the attribution prescript, but with specific page number (or numbers), and then use short inline citations with different page numbers linked to the first instance that has a the attribution, but the later inline citations are just short citations {{sfn}} or similar with no attribution (unfortunately I do not have an example to hand).
    • The other alternative is to move all the long citations down into a bullet list in the references section and then add short inline citations linked to the bullet list (like example one above), however that is a change in citation style and someone might object. What is not acceptable is multiple inline long citations to the same book (that is not covered by change in citation style ]] see the section Duplicate citations in WP:CITE—it is a mistake that many editors make when they first start to edit Wikipedia articles and have yet to learn how to format inline citations (because at first ref...tags are complicated and confusing for many).
This will be my last posting to this section, because I think we have said all there is to be said about the citation style in this article and we are drifting off into a more general conversation. I will continue on your talk page. -- PBS (talk) 10:59, 19 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The first thing to understand is that while Wikipedia is not a battle ground the people who wrote that have obviously not read Clausewitz or understood his maxim "War is the continuation of policy with other means". To try to read the Wikipedia policies and guidelines as one does legislation will end in tears. It is more important to understand the whole and not the parts: think of the polices and guidelines as a Bible, rather than legislation. If you read the Bible literally and take passages that support your point of view it will end up with others doing the same to support their's. However if you can compromise with others, then it is usually possible to come up with wording that everyone can live with (or at least most can). As an example see how long and hard it was to get the sentence "Articles must also comply with the copyright policy. into the lead of WP:V because the opposition to its inclusion argued that Wikipedia:Copyrights is not one of the three core content policies. Once it was agreed to include it in the lead of WP:V lots of problems went away and the precise wording of the sentence really does not matter.

One has to understand that polices and guidelines evolved organically over time, and as you point out usually a compromise between different editors. Those editors often coalesce into temporary parties (alliances) as people come and go. This means that things are often contradictory because shifting as the sands it depends on which party at a particular time and place can command a consensus, or more often a non-consensus that prevents change to rationalise the polices and guidelines. This does not mean that Wikipedia is a battle ground just that like any organisation "office politics" is prevalent, although because is a charity, the politics are motivated by what editors believe are the best interests of the project rather than for personal gain, although obviously some editors can be vindictive and spiteful (which motivates their behaviour in any given dispute with them opposing an editor they dislike or hold a grudge rather than considering the issue with disinterest) -- just see the behaviour of some editors on the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents . In some cases some editors are having a hard time in the real world, or are off their medicines, or have issues like autism, any of which can make them difficult to work with.

Let me give you two examples. The first is WP:ATTRIBUTION which is a failed policy. A party of editors decided that they would stream line WP:V and WP:NPOV in a new policy called WP:ATTRIBUTION. They did not develop it in secret, but most editors did not know that they were doing it until they suddenly redirected the two polices to the new combined one. At first because they were a coherent party, and because they had invested a lot of time developing the new policy they were invested in it, they were able to show that they had a consensus for the change. It might have stuck. However when User:Jimbo Wales came out against the change a poll was held which showed there was no consensus for the change.

At the time although a very active content maker I had no idea about the poll, as I did not look at the various forum where this was discussed. However as a rule I am very against large changes to policies (and to a lesser extent guidelines) and prefer incremental changes, as I think that the former is very disruptive and particularly as large changes always have unforeseen consequences.

The second is the difference between the Article tiles policy and the WP:Manual of Style guideline, the AT policy is based on "follow the sources Luke" while the MOS tends to be prescriptive. Although 95% of the time these two methods tend to end up at the same place on a specific issue, there can be disagreement over the 5% of differences, often with those who like the prescriptive approach, trying to change the AT policy, (I am in the follow the sources party) and this difference has existed since at least 2006.

2005–2007 is an important period in the development of Wikipedia policies and guidelines. They came about because of the outside pressure by the press which at the time enjoyed finding silly things in Wikipedia and publishing how dumb the project was. This lead to SV's creation of the section] WP:BURDEN in verification policy on 30 August 2005 and a year later based on a proposal by Jimbo at Wikimania 2006 to the creation of Wikipedia:100,000 feature-quality articles (on 14 September 2006).

Most editors would like to think that their contributions will help others. To do this Wikipedia must appear in searches. At the time search engines did not automatically place Wikipedia at the top of close to the top of their searches. There was a danger that unless Wikipedia was viewed regularly then its profile would slip and it would become as irrelevant (see List of online encyclopedias). Suddenly things like "If you want to publish things on Wikipedia you must provide sources ... see this policy", started to appear more often than before in talk page discussions, and non-sourced text would be deleted based on policy. This meant that people who wanted to add content had to acquire a knowledge of the policies and guidelines. Of course the old maxim "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from" (attributed to various people) can just as well be amended to "The wonderful thing about policies and guidelines is that there are so many of them to choose from", but choose from them one is a must in talk page conversations about content on Wikipedia. This was not so in the very early days.

In-text and in-line have two distinct meaning in guidelines on Wikipedia. The WP:INTEXT section was introduced by SV, and while I did not and still do not agree with her completely about its use, but I think the meaning is clear. In-line is used to distinguish between citations within the text and those located as bullet points in the reference list in the references section at the bottom of the article. The term general-reference used to mean a reference that appeared at the bottom of the article in a bullet pointed list which might or might not also support in-line citations. This meant that its original meaning was shorthand for the references in the "bullet pointed list of references at the bottom of the article", which thanks to its now different meaning means that one has to use a phrase when before one used two words! Sigh I lost that particular debate!

You write "{{DNB|inline=1...}} seems to implement {{Citation-attribution}}." — Yes it does but only for {{DNB}} as does {{EB1911}} and so on {{Citation-attribution}}, like {{Source-attribution}} are for in-line and "bullet pointed list of references at the bottom of the article", are for books which do not have customised template.

You wrote A crucial question probably is in which case .. Just like WP:V seems to accept general references... — You are totally wrong about this. Apart from the example I gave you above see for examples Alexander I of Russia (which uses {{EB1911}} and one of the examples in the guideline Battle of Camp Hill which uses {{Source-attribution}}.

You wrote "It seems always to say "this but also that" due to the history of the finding a consensus ..." — this is true for most of the policies and guidelines, particularly common ground between them.

You wrote "It sometimes also uses terminology that is perhaps not common knowledge. I had difficulties to grasp that "inline" and "in-text" attribution" — I explained those two above, but this is always a problem of in-group slang/shorthand in any organisation. What annoys me is when people use short links without giving them eg ASSERT instead of ASSERT on their first use in a posting, on the assumption that everyone can knows and remember every acronym use in the Wikipedia policies and guidelines.

You wrote "The citations that also serve as inline attributions must be distinguishable from the ordinary ones" — I think this is where you have a major misunderstanding. It does no harm to the project to attribute text that is no longer needs attribution, it does harm not to. As you know may know "no editor owns an article and any contributions can and may be mercilessly edited" (Wikipedia:Five pillars:Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute). This means that with other contributions and style changes an article that starts of with text copied from a PD source will move further and further from that source, until it is no longer a copy in any meaningful way. When that point is reached is nuanced and an editorial decision, but eventually most articles will end up no longer needing attribution to a PD source, although the source may still be cited there is a tool that can help do this objectively Earwig's Copyvio Detector one of a set of tools in the {{DYK tools}} box. As example of this is Alfred the Great: All First Revision as of 20:04, 27 October 2001‎, some Revision as of 14:13, 3 January 2011‎, None [Current Revision as of 12:22, 16 September 2022‎]

You wrote The articles mentioned as examples do not seem to be particularly well-chosen. Do you think there would be a chance for straightening WP:PLAG out and make it a bit more prescriptive? As I chose them I think that they are well chosen, although when I chose them there was a limited pool to choose from :-). However I think that your misunderstanding of WP:Plagiarism has more do with your observation than fact. As someone who has been working on the project for about 2 decades it is difficult for me to see the text through someone new to it. However changing things without an understanding often leads to unforeseen consequences. I suggest that you do not change anything until you have a better knowledge of the issue and have looked at lots of links to the {{DNB}} and {{EB1911}} templates.

-- PBS (talk) 14:24, 19 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dear PBS Thank you for teaching me so well. I admire your patience and wonder whether you are not wasting your time teaching me, while you could do better things. I feel some improvement in the WP:PLAG done by you should come out of our discussions. However, I fully agree with you that guidelines must not be upset by drastic changes but should evolve slowly getting clearer and more understandable, having less exceptions, and adjusting to the expectations of the editors and readers. Such changes should be lead by one or several senior Wikipedians like you and supported by a wide consensus. I am sometimes afraid that a small radical pressure group could force hurried revolutions upon us that might endanger Wikipedia's survival.
It is interesting to learn about Wikipedia's history. It is certainly a good thing that WP:V is taken more strictly and seriously. Verifiability through inline citations is certainly needed. It seems that many teachers tell their students to use Wikipedia, not for its text, but for its sources. An important step that I saw myself was when CaptainEek in September 2020 got it right to deprecate Inline parenthetical referencing. It seems the decision was taken by a discussion and vote in Village Pump (see [1]). I have not counted precisely but about 200 editors participated, which is not bad, but there are more than 119,682 active registered editors in the English Wikipedia (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics). You talk about a poll. I do not know how that works but I suppose it involves bigger numbers.
I have the impression you are telling me to omit the {{PD-notice}} attributions from the citations verifying the verbatim borrows from the DNB. Is this somehow prescribed in the 2nd paragraph of the section "Where to place ..." of WP:PLAG? It says:

If a significant proportion of the text is copied or closely paraphrased from a compatibly-licensed or public domain source, attribution is generally provided either through the use of an appropriate , or a general attribution template such as {{source-attribution}}, or similar annotation, placed in a "References section" near the bottom of the page. In such cases consider adding the attribution statements at the end of the Reference section directly under a line consisting of "Attribution:" (Attribution:) in bold:[19]

Excepted the final recommendation to place a general Attribution at the end of the References section, I find it not clear at all. It says "either-or" offering a choice between an "appropriate attribution template" and "general attribution template". What should an "appropriate attribution template" be?. The footnote 19 tries to fend off critcism for using ('''Atribution'''), which is kind of a pseudo section header. Perhaps it does not break the instruction by the letter but well in spirit.
However, in reality the only attribution template used is the one at the end of the references section. Inline citaions are used.
Yesterday I worked on Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, mostly on the sources but there is still so much missing, even page numbers. I would like to cite the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), published in 2009, a nice recent source (I have been criticised for using outdated sources). The local library has the 9 volumes. There also is an online version, similar to the one for the ODBC, but luckily unlike the ODBC freely accessible. The text has been updated in some cases but in most cases is the same as in the book but without the page numbers. The article about Hugh is quite long and I do not really know how to cite it. Shorter DIB article I have cited by counting paragraphs (e.g. Charles MacCarthy, 1st Viscount Muskerry).
It is late and I go to bed. The day passed fast and I have still not answered you properly. Please excuse me. Thanks for the explanations about in-text and inline attribution. That is now clear to me, even if I find the words chosen are quite confusing for the apprentice Wikipedian. With many thanks and best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 21:00, 21 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
"an appropriate attribution template" links to Category:Attribution templates so only use {{source-attribution}} if there is no specific template for that reference. Appart from anything else many of the specific templates have maintenance categories attached. See for example Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the Dictionary of National Biography.
"Irish Biography]] (DIB), published in 2009 ... There also is an online version, similar to the one for the ODBC ..." so don't include page numbers in the short citation just "author 2009", and place the online version in the list of long citations. Thats all you need to do (don't worry about the page numbers in the hard copy as 99% of readers who verify the source will use the online version). Do not count paragraphs for example the ODNB amend their entries adding a new date when they do. Counting paragraphs will only confuse the issue. Online has text search available, so just cite the whole article, an interested reader or editor will be able to find the information without needing a cou t of paragraphs.
You misunderstand footnote 19. You need to read the link in the footnote. If one places a semicolon at the start of a line the text will appear in bold, but the html that generates that will be broken unless the line ends in a full colon and has a specific meaning. So automatic text readers used by sight disabled people barf at that construction. Hence why we recommend creating bold with three single apostrophes:
; Attribution
☒N
'''Attribution:'''
checkY
-- PBS (talk) 18:49, 22 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Dear PBS, Thanks for the explanations. I understand now what the appropriate and the general attribution template are. What would you think of the following formulation for the paragraph under discussion:

If a significant proportion of the text is copied or closely paraphrased from a compatibly-licensed or public domain source, attribution is generally provided only at the end of of the "References section". No inline attribution is given in this case. The attribution at the end uses either a source-specific attribution template (e.g. {{DNB}}, or the general attribution template (i.e. {{Source-attribution}}). The attribution template should appear under a line "Attribution:" (Attribution:) in bold:[19]

Hmm; still some more work needed on this.
You talk about speed and users with slow connections. I think it is almost always the pictures or other graphics and not the characters on which a loading chokes. I learned this years ago from some some very experienced web programmers. The numeric details are difficult to work out but I think in well illustrated Wikipedia articles the images and graphics are several times the number of pixel than the text and the references together. For example on Donogh O'Brien, 4th Earl of Thomond the Page Size tool reports an HTML document size of 177 kB and HTML text is 57 kB (text + references) . The picture by it self has 342 KB, but somehow less than than seems to be downloaded. So normally it is not worthwhile to worry about a couple of characters more or less. —I am in trouble again Wikimedia wants to delete a picture I use in the article Almeric de Courcy, 23rd Baron Kingsale. Best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 20:43, 22 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Guild of Copy Editors' October 2022 newsletter

Guild of Copy Editors October 2022 Newsletter

Hello and welcome to our latest newsletter, a quarterly digest of Guild activities since June. Don't forget you can unsubscribe at any time; see below.

Drive: Of the 22 editors who signed up for our July Backlog Elimination Drive, 18 copy-edited, between them, 116 articles. Barnstars awarded are noted here.

Blitz: Participants in our August Copy Editing Blitz copy-edited 51,074 words in 17 articles. Of the 15 editors who signed up, 11 claimed at least one copy-edit. Barnstars awarded are noted here.

Drive: Forty-one editors took part in our September Backlog Elimination Drive; between them they copy-edited 199 articles. Barnstars awards are noted here.

Blitz: Our October Copy Editing Blitz begins on 16 October at 00:01 (UTC) and will end on 22 October at 23:59 (UTC). Barnstars awarded will be posted here.

Progress report: As of 19:57, 12 October 2022 (UTC), GOCE copyeditors have processed 303 requests for copy edit – including withdrawn and declined ones – since 1 January. At the time of writing, there are 77 requests awaiting attention and the backlog of tagged articles stands at 1,759. We always need more active, skilled copyeditors – particularly for requests – so please get involved if you can.

Election news: In our mid-year election, serving coordinators Baffle gab1978, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Reidgreg and Tenryuu were returned for another term, and were joined by new coordinator Zippybonzo. No lead coordinator was elected for this half-year. Jonesey95, a long-serving coordinator and lead, was elected as coordinator emeritus; we thank them for their service. Thank you to everyone who took part. Our next election of coordinators takes place throughout December. If you'd like to help out at the GOCE, please consider nominating yourself or other suitable editors (with their permission, of course!). It's your Guild, after all!

Thank you all again for your participation; we wouldn't be able to achieve what we have without you! Cheers from your GOCE coordinators Baffle gab1978, Dhtwiki, Miniapolis, Reidgreg, Tenryuu and Zippybonzo.

To discontinue receiving GOCE newsletters, please remove your name from our mailing list.

Baffle☿gab 03:07, 14 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

O'Neill Article

I was just going off the links in the articles when I edited that, but since you linked a pedigree. It says in the article his father is Henry MacShane O'Neill. Is this a different man than the Henry (d. 1608) in your pedigree? If so maybe the link to him should be killed in the article to clear up the confusion. The confusion that Shane O'Neill is an ancestor of the Kinard O'Neills. You are a good editor, you don't need to defer to me. You have a source! User:SKIBLY101 (talk) 19:31, 24 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

DearUser:SKIBLY101. Thanks for your quick reaction. To answer your question: our Turlough's father Henry Oge O'Neill (d. 1608) is not Henry MacShane O'Neill (d. 1622), son of Shane O'Neill the proud. The O'Neills are a big family with many branches and lots of people having the same name, many Hrnry O'Neills, many Hugh O'Neills and many Shane O'Neills. On must always consider the date of death if it is available. I wonder how the MacShane came into the title of the article. I would have called the biographical subject "Turlough mac Henry O'Neill (died 1608)". I also wonder whether the article as it stands establisheshis notability. With thanks and best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 19:23, 24 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Claud Hamilton, 1st Lord Paisley article

The year 1911a and 1911b seemed to be working ok, I guess you worked it out. However thanks for the changes in how the date and year are handled in CS1, use the |date= parameter rather than |year= so the template displays the long citation with the appended date letter eg date=1911a. -- PBS (talk) 13:20, 25 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Johannes_Schade&oldid=1118152799"