Talk:Kawasaki GPz1100B1

How to cite hardcopy manuals

How do I add citations to hardcopy manuals and physical observations? I have been researching this model using the vehicles I own. Any help appreciated. Sid — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sid.young (talk • contribs) 18:36, 21 December 2010

See Wikipedia:Citing sources for a complete explanation. The short answer is, say <ref>Author, Title, Date, Publisher, ISBN, Page number</ref> and leave it at that. The idea is to give another guy enough info to find the book. Try to make it easy for the person who wants to verify the source. A URL is not mandatory; Wikipedia is happy to accept citations that are not on the Internet. If you want to be more fancy, you can use the {{Citation}} template and paste in the template and fill in the appropriate fields (as much as you can -- not all are necessary).

Note that maintenance tags like {{Original research}} are meant to be used by an editor who has discovered inappropriate material added by a previous editor to tag it for future maintenance. They are not meant for cases where you yourself deliberately write original research into a page -- if you are aware that what you are writing is original research, then the thing to do is stop and do not add it to Wikipedia. If you look at Wikipedia:Five pillars, you'll see that verifiability is core principal: everything must be checkable by other editors. If it hasn't been published, then you can't use it.

Also, see Wikipedia:Article titles. The new pages you created should be called Kawasaki GPz1100B1 and Kawasaki GPz1100B2, not GPz1100B1 and GPz1100B2. Although, I would have to ask you: if you delete all the original research, is there enough left to justify three pages? I think the original page ought to be able to cover it all.

Some other hints: leave out colors. They vary by country and market, and are too trival for an encyclopedia. Also, model identification and all the frame numbers are not encyclopedic. This is an encyclopedia, not a guide for collectors or restorers. We are in the process of deleting frame numbers and so on from the existing articles. Stick to information that major media and recognized authorities have said about the bike.

You might want to slow down a bit and not create too many new pages yet, perhaps stick to smaller edits. You are welcome to forge ahead boldy with big projects, but the risk is somebody will revert all your work and you'll be offended or feel like your work went to waste. Hence, smaller steps entail less risk. --Dbratland (talk) 04:47, 22 December 2010 (UTC)