User talk:TylerBurden

Administrators' newsletter – December 2023

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2023).

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:55, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – January 2024

News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2023).

Administrator changes

Clovermoss

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Maxim

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Arbitration

• Following the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections, the following editors have been appointed to the Arbitration Committee: Aoidh, Cabayi, Firefly, HJ Mitchell, Maxim, Sdrqaz, ToBeFree, Z1720.
• Following a motion, the Arbitration Committee rescinded the restrictions on the page name move discussions for the two Ireland pages that were enacted in June 2009.
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Miscellaneous

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:54, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Help

Hello, I was wondering if I could recieve some guidance, seeing as you have more experience with Wikipedia than me. On the Russo-Swedish War (1590–1595) article, I added "Swedish victory" providing 2 sources and later 4, all of them were reliable as far as I know. Then, it was changed to "Russian victory" by someone named Emilioveh, citing 4 sources which probably aren't as reliable as the citations I gave. I recently reverted this, on the basis of the sources not being as reliable as the sources I cited. I just want to know if this is against any guideline or something of the sort. Thank you Gvssy (talk) 05:29, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

@Gvssy Hi, sounds like a content dispute, so should be discussed on the talk page of the article where each side can present their points. I can have a look as well. TylerBurden (talk) 19:46, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Thirty Years War

Just a quick note to thank you for fighting off various "additions" and proposed "amendments" to this article :) In case it comes up again, Wedgwood says the civilian population living in Magdeburg had fallen to around 5,000 by the end of the siege. Not the same thing as claiming the other 25k died. Robinvp11 (talk) 13:56, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@Robinvp11 Thanks, same to you. TylerBurden (talk) 18:38, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Updating reference and note styles

I wonder if you can advise on the following. I am trying to understand how to improve reference and note styles. I get that referencing styles cannot be changed without consensus, but....

I made some comments at Talk:Vasa (ship)#Referencing. I tried to make a good case, preparing a demonstration of functionality. It appears to me to have been rebuffed by the predominant editor of the article (c.40%) on the basis of "I just don't like it". I decided to let the matter lie as I was getting nowhere.

Then I discovered a dead link reference in the article that I would like to have read. The normal solution (for me) is to tag the dead link and see if someone fixes it. But this was in one of the "two references in one" cites, so I split the reference with an edit summary that explained why I was doing this[1]. This was rapidly reverted[2], without the dead link being fixed.

Shortly afterwards, the notelist template was removed from the "notes" section and those notes using the efn template were altered to another style.[3] Then the matter was raised on my talk page. On checking, I found that the usage of efn templates substantially predated my involvement in the article – which demonstrates that other editors there choose to use that functionality.

So, I suppose this is three issues, in ascending order of difficulty.
(1) Is it correct to just go and reinstate the efn templates as usage by other editors is an obvious consensus that this style is useful to the article?
(2) How do I get the article's referencing style into the modern world so that the encyclopedia reader can easily see what references support the text?
(3) Any thoughts on how to deal with an editor who is somewhat difficult to handle? This is not an out and out case of bad behaviour, so "difficult" is a considered word. I appreciate that some of my actions could be criticised, but I have tried my best to do everything right on this and other articles where we interact, but all of them seem to have unsatisfactory elements to them.

I am fine with discovering that there are some things that I cannot do, but I don't want to miss an opportunity to make what I perceive to be improvements. Thanks, ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 20:23, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

@ThoughtIdRetired Hello, I'm not sure how much advice I'd be able to offer in this dispute since I have not done much work with the finer details of reference/note styles, especially not on featured articles. But I agree with the sentiment that it should be as easy as possible for readers to access sources, and if that means abandoning some old school styles that some editors might prefer due to personal taste/being used to them I think ultimately the priority is the reader. I took a brief look at the thread and I think you made fair points, but it seems the discussion didn't lead to anything productive so in that case I'd say the course of action would be to involve more people in it. As you probably know, there are quite a few different venues where you can ask for additional opinions or request dispute resolution. TylerBurden (talk) 23:18, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer. I'll keep chipping away at the problem, not least because a newly published source means that the article can have a lot more content now. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 13:58, 20 January 2024 (UTC)