Talk:Geneva official chestnut tree

A fact from Geneva official chestnut tree appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 7 January 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the opening of the first bud of a horse chestnut tree in Geneva (pictured), as recorded by the secretary of the Parliament, announces the beginning of spring?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/January. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Geneva official chestnut tree.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cielquiparle (talk) 10:05, 28 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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The Geneva official chestnut tree in 2011

... that the opening of the first bud of a horse chestnut tree in Geneva, as recorded by the Secretary of the Parliament, announces the beginning of spring? Source: https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/tradition/en/home/traditions/botany-in-geneva-and-the--marronnier-de-la-treille-.html
- Reviewed:

Created by Schutz (talk). Self-nominated at 12:19, 11 December 2022 (UTC).[reply]

New enough, long enough, hook within length. No other policy issues. Hook is cited and verified in source. Just needs QPQ. MB 19:31, 11 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank you for the review; I will gladly perform some reviews for QPQ, but I did not run in order to perform some immediately, since I had read that "The first five article nominations made by an editor are free, and do not require a QPQ" -- and as far as I remember, this is my first nomination ever. Cheers, Schutz (talk) 21:37, 11 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  - Quick ping to reviewer @MB: as nom does not appear to have any DYK credits. PCN02WPS (talk | contribs) 22:00, 14 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I had missed that. In that case, this is good to go. MB 22:05, 14 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What we changed

Hi @Schutz. Here are the main things I quickly changed on Saturday which could be added back with citations:

"Between 1807 and 1817, Marc-Louis Rigaud...". I changed this to "Starting in 1808" because that was what I spotted in the source, but it's possible the years were specified elsewhere, so please do check.
"Researchers have thus been interested in it, as a witness to how a plant reacts to changing climatic conditions." Removed sentence as it didn't have a footnote and I couldn't easily find it stated.
"Between 2005 and 2019...an inversion of this trend has been observed"... Couldn't find the exact dates referenced, so removed and reworded to align with what the source said.
"According to MeteoSwiss..." Moved placement of footnote 4 to end of paragraph (as far as I was able to verify); the misplacement was rather unfortunate because it made it look like the rest of the sentence was completely unsourced, when in fact it wasn't.

Obviously others also made changes, but it may be easy enough to diff to check what they did. Cielquiparle (talk) 01:51, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The other suggestion is to please find at least one more secondary source (e.g. a newspaper article or book) that isn't a government body to cite within the article. Apparently this isn't a hard and fast rule within DYK, but in line with WP:GNG, everyone is happy when the article is citing significant coverage in multiple reliable, independent sources. Cielquiparle (talk) 10:18, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The other thing I noticed is that in a couple of cases, the information cited was clearly stated in the sources listed under "External links". It just wasn't footnoted accordingly, so it appeared "unsourced". So we added footnotes for those references to make it clear. The overarching issue was just to make sure that every single fact and observation stated within the text was explicitly attributed to a specific source. I believe that was the main issue that @Paradise Chronicle was flagging. It is true that there are different citation styles followed within Wikipedia, but at minimum it's important for people to be able to quickly find where each bit of information came from. Cielquiparle (talk) 11:23, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry a bit for not actively taking part even though being pinged. I cherish both of you, but I sort of have lost interest in the issue. I have taken part in discussions with the aim to improve the article from the very beginning of its DYK nomination on 11 December and then again on my talk page and just had to notice all advice did not help, so help your self. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 08:41, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @Paradise Chronicle I think it's a language issue as well. Personally "source for each phrase" sounds confusing and I also struggled to work out what exactly you meant by it initially. What is important is not necessarily that every single "phrase" (or string of words) has a citation, but that each fact and point stated in the article, and each quotation, is attributed to a specific source and can be verified accordingly. The frequency of how often those footnotes appear is to some extent a matter of choice, *if* there is a block of information all coming from the same source, but the flip side of that is that if you only have one citation at the end of each paragraph, it implies that every single point made in that paragraph originated from that one source. (And if it did not, we tag it as "failed verification".) If it is the case that multiple sources were consulted in the construction of a sentence, then yes, you would often end up citing a different source for every "phrase"; but terminology-wise, I wouldn't fixate on "phrase". Cielquiparle (talk) 08:53, 12 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comments. Indeed, it's mostly a matter of the rules for DYK to be clarified (which they seen to have been). In any case, I've looked at your points:

"Between 1807 and 1817": 1807 was a typo; 1817 was in some sources, but I actually found clear ones indicating that this continued until 1831; updated.
"Researchers have thus been interested in it, as a witness to how a plant reacts to changing climatic conditions": I haven't found yet an indirect source for this (I know it exists, though), but I have found two actual papers as examples, so that should be good.
"Between 2005 and 2019": for this one, my understanding is that the goal was to avoid the weasel words "in recent years" on FRWP. "As of 2022" works well, so nothing to change (although the content of the Meteosuisse page has been there since at least 2019, so not sure which year to cite)
I have added the two scientific papers (secondary sources discussing the raw data) plus the "Stoller and Beer" book to the article (it is without any doubt a secondary source, but it is still from a government body). In any case, the document from the "living traditions of Switzerland" is an ok secondary/tertiary source to me, and we've had that from the beginning.

There is still plenty to add to the article, and I'll go slowly (probably improving FRWP first), but actual independent sources are likely to be scarce (and I've done quite a bit of searching). Thank you for your help in any case ! Schutz (talk) 14:35, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]