Talk:Frederick Oswald Barnett

Plagarism

I gotta believe that the material in this is lifted from someplace else. Unschool 05:58, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

The word is plagiarism. The entry is fully referenced. Richpond (talk) 08:21, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

First of all, I guess the intended light tone of my comment was not evident when read. I am quite aware of what plagarism is, and if I was certain of it, I would have said so. Having said that, being "fully referenced" is no guarantee that a work is not plagiarized. What made this stand out is that few articles are "born" in such a complete form, with this type of style. It certainly does not have the appearance of something created for Wikipedia.

Furthermore, while non-web sources are absolutely acceptable, they do have the downside that very few can quickly check on them, since most editors are hardly likely to have the sources in their possession.

Finally, the article is not fully sourced in an acceptable way. While there is a list of references, there are no footnotes telling us what information came from what sources. Of course, this is a new article, and I'm sure you'll be providing this later. Unschool 08:40, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

I apologise for the terseness of my response - I thought it was some smart-arse. While I certainly referred to the sources cited, the actual text is my own composition, The "completeness" is because the work is to be assessed as a university tutorial paper (perhaps rather hastily assembled because it was due today, Monday). The referencing style is the so-called "Harvard" style which we are asked to use at uni. Does Wikipedia prefer a footnote? Because of the above-mentioned haste, I have not yet worked this out fully. I will do more homework! Richpond (talk) 06:20, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

References

Answering questions as best I can

Well, first of all, I need to make clear that I am by no stretch of the imagination an authority on Wikipedia, its policies, or its procedures. I am a casual editor who contributes whenever he gets a chance, and occasionally I see things from which I learn. And I learn slowly.

References

For example, references. There are two ways to add references, that I know of.

• You see that button with a little image of a globe between the underlined Ab and the large A? Oh, to see what I am talking about, you need to have hit the "edit this page" tab at the top. Okay, anyway, if you hit it, it'll open up a set of brackets, with a field pre-created bewteen them, and you can just paste your URL. You end up with something that looks like this: [1] However, apparently over the past couple of years, this form of posting references has become deprecated. Instead—
• You are now supposed to use the little button all the way to the right, again, above the editing box. That box has in it the following: <ref /ref>. What you do is the same thing, but when you click on it, instead of a pair of brackets, you get an HTML looking set of code, and again, a pre-created field into which you can insert your URL, giving you something that looks like this: . Okay, so I guess, now that I look at your post, I realize that you've already kinda figured that out. But, unfortunately, you are probably not done.

If at this point someone clicks on the little number there, they get . . . nothing. What you need to do is to create a reference list and section. You do this by creating a little section (I see that you understand that already) entitled "References" or some such, and then, underneath is, you simply need to put: {{reflist}}. Now your references will appear automatically in the section.

There are all sorts of details in how to do references so that they are efficient for others' use, but I have literally only done that once, and I was so slow and inefficient that I haven't done it again. But you seem to be the scholarly type, so I encourage you to become very familiar with this page. I'm pretty sure that if you are using non-web sources, that you need to go with the second format, the little ref tags.

Photos

Also, I would like to add some photographs (tho have not worked out how to do that either) The intended photos are scanned from one of the source books, and thus are not my property, tho I would argue that they are in the public domain. Is this acceptable to WP? Richpond (talk) 06:53, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

If you have photos to add, you first upload them to Wikimedia Commons. Then, after you have the photos there, you can add them to your articles. Learn how here. There are strict rules regarding copyright law, and you might find it difficult to get around them, but there you have it.

Original research

Okay, now this final topic I'm really dreading to bring up with you, because a) I might be wrong, and b) if I'm right, you're likely to be very, very unhappy. You may have come across editors mentioning the Wikipedia policy called No Original Research. It's something people take very seriously. Based upon some articles I've seen before, I believe that some editors might say that your article needs to be deleted because it is your own, personal work. I don't really understand the rules surrounding this, but I do remember on one occasion that an article (I believe it was mathematical in nature, but it's been a couple of years, and I've forgotten what it was, exactly) was actually deleted because the grad student who wrote it was basing it upon the research that he had done, if I recall correctly, for his masters or doctorate. He pointed to all the research he had done, but it was to no avail, as others cited no original research. Now as I recall, his article seemed really weird, and yours covers a historical figure, so maybe there's no comparison. And I certainly would never report your article as such—it looks good to me. I would recommend trying to find some online references to him, as that will help to placate those who are annoyed that they cannot from the article even confirm his existence, but it's only a suggestion; there is no requirement that you do this.

Okay, I've got to run. I recognize that I may just have spent 15 minutes typing up stuff that you already know. If so, please don't feel that I've been patronizing; my intent is only to be helpful, not condescending. I wish you good luck, the article is starting to shape up. Cheers. Unschool 03:47, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

References

New External Link added

I moderate the Culture Victoria website and have added an external link to images and the story of campaigner Frederick Oswald Barnett.Eleworth (talk) 06:10, 11 August 2010 (UTC)