Talk:Michelle McNamara

Contested deletion

This page should not be speedily deleted because... This woman's book is all over the news? She maybe caught a super serial killer? --Rue-chan (talk) 23:05, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Agreed, it seems rather surprising this page was deleted so flippantly. Nivenus (talk) 23:35, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

The deletion was requested so that the draft of a proper article about her can be moved here MBD123 (talk) 01:06, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Contested deletion

This page should not be speedily deleted because... the subject of the article is a best selling author and has been making headline news all day. --Jason.Wester (talk) 23:55, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

References

Contested deletion

This page should not be speedily deleted because this woman has significance in her own right due to her #1 New York Times bestselling true crime novel. She deserves to be more than a footnote on Patton Oswalt's page.

Updated

I updated this entry significantly. It was clear especially given recent events that McNamara is notable for her work in true crime research, but the entry was not doing a great job in establishing her notability.

I was going to continue to update the entry if more information came to light, but the recent edits changing the date format from the default date format when editing -- and the more concerning addition of the completely useless access date to every citation -- have pretty much stopped me in my tracks. I strongly believe that unless the date of a citation is not available, usage of the access date is not functionally improving the page -- and actually negatively impacts what was a clean entry by clogging up the citations. Adding them here negatively impacts usability and legibility. After doing so much work to update the entry, it was very unwelcome to see these changes to the page. So I am not going to continue to edit it going forward. I would encourage the editor who made these changes to reflect on how neither set of changes improves this entry, and how the edits might be seen as unwelcome and unnecessary. Quite frankly, if I thought they were enhancing the page in any way, I would have added them myself. -- BrillLyle (talk) 18:09, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Hi BrillLyle, I made the edits you are referring to. Firstly, I'm not sure what you mean by default date format? I don't believe there is a default date format when editing. It's more likely an editor's choice or the format typically used by the country where the subject of the article was born. Australians generally use dmy, whereas Americans use mdy. See the article for Nicole Kidman, the Australian actress, versus the article for Meryl Streep, and you'll see that they both use different formats. When the article was created, the mdy format was used, and that is what I have used when I have edited the article. Michelle was also American and American articles tend to use the mdy format, see MOS:DATETIES. As for the accessdates, that's just a pretty common thing to add; it's something I see used a lot and what I tend to add also. I understand your objection to my edits, as everyone has their own preferences. If you prefer to not see accessdates on Wikipedia, you can make changes to your account that will make it so accessdates are hidden sitewide, see Help:Citation Style 1/accessdate. Melonkelon (talk) 20:38, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

@Melonkelon: Thanks for the response. FYI - I have not adjusted my date settings, so I am using what the default date settings were when I started my account in 2013, so there is a default setting. I believe the DD Month YYYY format is also more universal, clear, and is a lot more inclusive to non-U.S. editing. As far as access dates, now we have the Internet Archive bot checking links, the access date is no longer important. Beyond the fact that there is link rot whether the access date is listed or not. The date of the citation's publication is more important actually - and for some reason is not always added to citations, which I find mystifying. I am not interested in masking anything here. I am interesting in editing and curating citations in a way that is as lean and efficient as possible, friendly for both editors and end-users. I think the more important question is why make these changes at all? It was clear I was significantly updating this entry so it was current and I did a good job establishing notability and clarifying the scope of this person's work. So why make changes to the entry that have no substantive value in terms of improving the content of the article? I see the changes as very negative for the end-user. I firmly believe in collaborative editing but this doesn't seem to add content or improve the page at all. I don't want to edit a page if another editor is going to go in and add unnecessary clerical information that is of no use to anyone. It just stops the process in its tracks in my view, so I wanted to state my objection here. I guess good luck going forward editing this article, but I am going to move on. -- BrillLyle (talk) 07:23, 2 May 2018 (UTC)