Wikipedia:WikiProject Article Rescue Squadron/Newsletter/20091001/Feature

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Article Rescue Squadron Newsletter

Issue 2

Feature: FeydHuxtable: Search Techniques – what the veterans know

  

Search Techniques – what the veterans know.

An ARS 'copter searching high and wide in its quest to save endangered articles.

The Article Rescue Squad is legendary for its ability to locate sources for vulnerable articles. While policy based arguments and even raw number of votes are important, finding quality sources is often the most essential contribution to a successful rescue effort. Google is usually the first port of call for Veterans and raw recruits alike. The difficulty with Google is often the shear number of results it returns - you might get millions, but with less than 0.01% providing the significant independent coverage of the article topic we prefer due to our guidelines. The chances of finding high quality sources are often boosted by using the specialist Google pages:

Knowledge of google syntax helps the rescuer bring back a result set thats much more likely to include sources talking specifically about the topic rather than passing mentions. The same effect can be achieved with advanced options, but knowing the Google syntax is faster, and you can save search strings for future use. For example, here is a search string that is useful for finding results for bilateral relations articles:

  • CountryX CountryY (relations OR bilateral treaty OR trade agreement OR state visit OR embassy)

The String above will bring back results that talk about both countries plus at least one from the following list: relations, a bilateral treaty , a trade agreement, a state visit or an embassy.

You can also search specific domains such as .gov, .edu, and .org in google by adding site:domain to your search. Examples: murder rate site:.gov-this will return "murder rate" results from only .gov (government) sites.
murder rate site:.edu-this will return "murder rate" results from only .edu (educational) sites.

Non Google Searches

Sometimes valuable newspaper articles will be missed by Google, especially if they are more than 5 years old. In these cases directly searching the newspapers through links available at List of online newspaper archives can be invaluable. There are many specialists databases available online, for example science research can be great for scientific subjects.

Depending on where you live, by googling "Ask a librarian", you can often find an online service where you can get help from librarians to locate sources in real time with live chat!

If you have a library card, you can personally access a vast range of specialist databases and archives. College and university students also have access to databases which are not available to the public.

It helps to be aware that while good sourcing will save an article in the vast majority of cases, sometimes when its under attack by editors wanting to delete the article they will still remain determined to delete it even if several top University press books are found that are 100% focused to the topic.

Using the find and find3 template

There is a special template which can be found at the top of all article deletion pages, called {{Find}}. For example, the Article for Deletion Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ospina Coffee Company has: Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL created using {{findsources|Ospina Coffee Company}}

An expanded template, called {{Find3}} searches even more sources. For example, lets say the article Star Wars is up for deletion. On the talk page of the article being deleted, type:

{{Find3|Star Wars}}

Which would produce:

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Information on each one of the sources is found at {{Find3}}

Keep in mind:

  1. The search results with find3 and find search for phrases. It may be necessary to remove the quotes creating the phrases and search for the words separately. So for example, "Ospina Coffee Company" will only search for the full phrase "Ospina Coffee Company" by removing the quotes, you search for every article which has those three words.
  2. Sometimes you have to creatively search. In the Ospina Coffee Company example, removing the word company and searching only for the two words Ospina Coffee without the quotes reveals many more sources.

What to do once you have found sources

There are several different approaches to take when an article is up for deletion and you have found relevant sources. The most important key to remember is that you must mention the new sources in the Article for deletion itself, otherwise the closing administrator will not know about your added sources and improvements to the article.

There are two traditional ways this has been done.

  1. The fastest method is to simply copy and paste the article sources in the Articles for Deletion discussion. For example:
    More sources: [1] a Pearson Education book, [2] a tutorial in the netzwelt.de online magazine, which is a top 100 German site alexa entry, used a fair bit on the de.wiki -- at the bottom of their main page, they claim 1,57 million unique visitors per month.
  2. The second method is to first add the references to the article, click the history button, and select the edit differences which have the improvements, then mention the improvements on the Article for Deletion page. For example:
    Note to closing admin this page has gone through significant improvements since nomination.[3]

Other sources

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