Talk:Joseph O. Carter

locating news articles

This article relies heavily of facsimiles of newspapers held at the Library of Congress. Surely, a better in-source location can be given to aid the reader in finding the source that supports the Wikipedia article text than "p. Image n". Perhaps a column number would be helpful: |at=p. n, col. m (using the page number from the source rather than the image number). The LOC website does allow searching and does provide OCR of the image that can be searched but neither of these is reliable. For example, this cite gives as a title "General notice". I was not able to find that using the search tools at the LOC website (and am not interested enough to read the whole image). This one in particular caught my eye. How is a reader supposed to find that? Also, mismatched brackets in that 'title'.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:19, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

So, you're talking about formatting on the citations, right? Consistency is everything on Wikipedia, especially if something goes through a review process. With the LOC, at least with the Hawaii ones, most have "Image" but do not have "Page". Perhaps that's because some of the scanned pages themselves do not show a page on the original. For instance:

"Death of Minister Carter". The Daily Bulletin. Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands. November 19, 1891. p. Image 2. Retrieved October 7, 2017 – via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

I use the drop-down toolbar in my edit window. So, the inconsistency is frustrating for the editor, especially if you're used to just filling in a page number. Going back and forth on articles of any length can be error prone. So, I went with the consistency of what LOC does.

The column number is a great suggestion, by the way.

— Maile (talk) 13:01, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

Yes. The purpose of citations in Wikipedia articles is to identify the sources that support whatever is in the articles. We should, as a matter of courtesy, make it as easy as possible for readers to find that information in the source. I understand that making citations work well for readers, who are our primary customers, may be difficult and/or frustrating for editors because certain tools have limited functionality and sources don't always lend themselves to modern citation practice. But making it easier for our readers to locate the sources is our job as editors.

It is unfortunate that some newspapers did not include pagination. In the above example, you are citing a newspaper without pagination. "Image 2" is something that the Library of Congress (or the University of Hawaii) made up. So, in the example citation you are blending metadata from two sources into a single citation. You could not go to a library that holds an original copy of that 19 November 1891 newspaper and expect to find Image 2 among its pages. Pagination in citations should always reflect the pagination used in the source. For example, when we cite the PDF of something, we don't cite the PDF file's page number but we cite the page number in the source – this PDF has only one page but we would cite it as page 8 because that is how the source is paginated. When the source lacks pagination, perhaps the solution is to 'trust' the University of Hawaii and use their sequence number as a page number. The example then might be written: |at=p. 2?, col. 2.

For densely packed newspaper pages like these, I think it important to help the reader locate the supporting information in these sources. WP:V at WP:CHALLENGE has this: "The cited source must clearly support the material as presented in the article. Cite the source clearly and precisely (specifying page, section, or such divisions as may be appropriate)." This is why I suggested the in-source location style that I did.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:22, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I just went through the entire article and replaced the Image numbers with col. numbers. And, yes, I agree that it made it much better. — Maile (talk) 14:27, 7 October 2017 (UTC)