Talk:Paul Newman (linguist)

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References

A bot created by Tim1357 has tagged this article with the label

and has posted the following message to my talk page:

Unreferenced BLPs

Hello VikSol! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 1 of the articles that you created is tagged as an Unreferenced Biography of a Living Person. The biographies of living persons policy requires that all personal or potentially controversial information be sourced. In addition, to ensure verifiability, all biographies should be based on reliable sources. If you were to bring this article up to standards, it would greatly help us with the current 197 article backlog. Once the article is adequately referenced, please remove the {{unreferencedBLP}} tag. Here is the article:

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

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 09:56, 25 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed the tag and posted this reply on Tim1357's talk page:

Paul Newman (linguist)

Hi, Tim1357,

DASHbot has left a message on my talk page saying I created an unreferenced article Paul Newman (linguist) and should add references. I am curious what kind of references you think this article needs to be properly referenced. This article includes a bibliography of 9 books by its subject, the linguist Paul Newman, contains 11 links to other Wikipedia articles, and contains 3 online links, 2 of them to articles on the author from reliable sources (one of them a website at the University of Indiana, another a website at the University of Hawaii), and finally an interview with Paul Newman from the scholarly journal Semiotica. The article text also contains direct references to published works, in the form "Modern Hausa-English Dictionary (1977)" and The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar (2000)". This provides enough verifiable material to make up a valid article on a person. Furthermore, the article contains few or no controversial statements and certainly no personal observations, so it is not in any kind of danger zone. I suggest your bot be fine-tuned to avoid these "false positives".

However, if you think there is some other kind of reference that is required (a reference to a paper scholarly journal, perhaps?), I would be grateful for the information.

Regards, VikSol (talk) 03:38, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! The references in a biography of a living person are used to support assertions made in the article, such as "In addition to degrees in anthropology and linguistics he holds a JD and is a member of the Indiana state bar." The references aren't a list of works published by the individual in question. Hope that helps! Josh Parris 04:18, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If it helps any, the issue is not so much notability (does the person merit an article) as verifiability (backing up all information from a source, making the relationship between info and source as clear as possible, preferably using inline citation). Rd232 ^talk 17:35, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also, Dashbot does not (AFAIK) add tags - it just notifies people of their existence. In this case the tag was added in June 2009,[1] over six months before Dashbot was created. Rd232 ^talk 17:37, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]