User talk:Dina Fox

Welcome!

Hello, Dina Fox, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created, such as Joe Cabot, may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Questions or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! ... discospinster _talk 16:36, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed deletion of Joe Cabot

The article Joe Cabot has been proposed for deletion because, under Wikipedia policy, all biographies of living persons created after March 18, 2010, must have at least one reliable source that directly supports material in the article.

If you created the article, please don't take offense. Instead, consider improving the article. For help on inserting references, see Referencing for beginners, or ask at the help desk. Once you have provided at least one reliable source, you may remove the {{prod blp}} tag. Please do not remove the tag unless the article is sourced. If you cannot provide such a source within ten days, the article may be deleted, but you can request that it be undeleted when you are ready to add one. ... discospinster _talk 16:36, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

re Joe Cabot

OK, this is the deal with the deal with the Joe Cabot article. Our regulations on articles about living persons are very strict (they are described at WP:BLP) because we don't want to inadvertently publish false information about a person or cause a person unnecessary distress.

Now, granted, the material in the article is in no way negative or defamatory. "He is best known for his poetic phrasing and mute-on/mute-off virtuosity", he was born in Cleveland, his father's name is Joseph, yadda yadda -- these seem unobjectionable.

However, for organization reasons we don't (much) differentiate between negative and neutral-or-positive information. Partly because we don't want to get into adjudicating what is or is not likely to cause to distress to persons.

For instance: for all we know, Cabot wasn't born in Cleveland would be enraged at the suggestion. There's probably no reason for you to lie about that, but who knows? There might be, or you might be relying on faulty sources. Or perhaps he's not known for "poetic phrasing" but rather for, I don't know, harsh aural attacks or something, and would consider it defamatory to be characterized as a poetic-phrasing type person. None of this is likely, but neither is it guaranteed to never occur in articles of this type.

So we err on the side of caution by being very strict about statements made in articles about living persons. We need verifiable (see WP:V) references from reliable sources (see WP:RS) for most statements about living persons. The article currently does have two good references, and this is fine, but the bulk of the article and the statements about the person appear to be not referenced.

You must have gotten this information from somewhere, can you include it? The references need not be online, although they should be at least theoretically obtainable (e.g., not privately held). Can you include them in the article? Or message me if you'd like my help in formatting them to use in the article, or have any other questions or concerns. Cheers, Herostratus (talk) 04:00, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much for taking the time to explain...I still can't seem to grasp how to write the codes for the sourcing and citations. I am working on the rest of the article, and trying to work the actual sources into the writing itself (as I did in the first paragraph), but that gets kind of old! If you could continue to check my work out, I would really appreciate it. Thanks again.

References in Joe Cabot

Dina. I saw your edit summary about "still trying to figure out..." Tell me where you want to add a citation and details about the citation and I will help you. I added a few New York Time references in response to your help desk post, hoping they would serve as examples that you could emulate, but I can understand how it it can still look like another language. Have you taken a slow look at Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 20:31, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks so much for the offer of help. I am working on the rest of the article as well as the citations. I added the source material for the first paragraph within the paragraph itself, hoping that that would suffice, but the "citation needed" is still there. Yeah, I've read all the wiki articles about referencing for beginners...so embarassed I can't seem to grasp it!

Let me try to break it down for you in a way that might make more sense. Right now the page has reference coding at the bottom that looks like this {{reflist}}, That code allows you to place footnotes in the article and there's nothing more you need to worry about that.

Now, what can be confusing it that what one sees when editing the page is not the same as what one sees when reading the page. Citations to sources are placed directly in the text, right next to what you want to provide a cite for, but those citations will appear to a reader as footnotes, like this.^[1][2] To get those footnotes, you place while editing a citation to a source between two code tags like this <ref>citation text</ref>. Note that they are the same except that the second one has a closing slash ("/"). Anything you place between those <ref></ref> code tags will display when reading at the bottom of the article.

So say I wanted to cite the following sentence to some book: The sky is blue. What I would type is this:

The sky is blue<ref>Name of book, date, author, publisher isbn#, etc.</ref>

After I save this, what a reader would see in the body of the article is this:

The sky is blue.^[1]

And what they would see at the bottom of the article is

References

^ Name of book, date, author, publisher isbn#, etc.

So all you need to do to cite a particular source is go to the place in the text where the sentence is that you want to provide a citation for, go to the end of the sentence, type an opening reference tag (<ref>), name your source (The New York Times, May 3, 1885, P. 34) type a closing ref tag (</ref>), and then click save page. Do not worry about the more fancy code I used between the ref tags in the article. That's just formatting template, and someone else can pretty-up your references later.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:59, 15 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think I got it! Thank you, thank you for breaking it down for me in such a way. I will give it a shot very soon.