Talk:Joseph Watson (mayor)

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the politics and government work group.

Philadelphia Low‑importance

	Philadelphia portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Philadelphia, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Philadelphia on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PhiladelphiaWikipedia:WikiProject PhiladelphiaTemplate:WikiProject PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Human rights Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Human rights, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Human rights on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Human rightsWikipedia:WikiProject Human rightsTemplate:WikiProject Human rightsHuman rights articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

There are a number of errors and inaccuracies on this page. I just created a page on wikitree for Joseph Watson with much better information at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Watson-29647

I would update data here, but as I understand Wikipedia policy (possibly incorrectly), there are two things I'm not allowed to do:

use primary sources rather than secondary sources
use my own writing as a source.

Given that my work on wikitree largely used primary sources, I'm not sure what to do other than make this note here.

Some sample errors:

Cornelius Sinclair was about 10 years old so calling him a "man" seems inappropriate.
"Johnson and Tilghman were later freed" is both unclear since the only Johnson mentioned previously on the page was one of the perpetrators and also wrong because the Johnson who was one of the victims wasn't freed, he died and was buried in a shallow grave in Mississippi. This probably meant to say "Scomp and Tilghman were later freed", but that still would be wrong since Scomp and Tilghman were freed and returned to Philadelphia along with Alexander Manlove and Mary Fisher was freed at the same time but didn't return until later.
"able to get 10 kidnap victims released"...well, he noted that he'd saved 8 victims, and 2 more were expected to be returned, but there's some evidence that more may have been released later.
"he failed on two others"...not clear who these two others are as Watson provided a list of two dozen who he failed to locate.

Trinsics (talk) 17:50, 27 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]