Talk:Nehemiah Shumway

Rootsweb external link

I am not in the habit of adding or defending external links of dubious value. I think the rootsweb link should stay here because (1) this very link is specifically cited as a source of information about Shumway in a WP:RS (Makers of the Sacred Harp) published by a reputable academic press, (2) guidelines such as WP:USERG apply to the sources we use for article content, not to external links. Wareh (talk) 17:13, 6 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. It doesn't matter what the University of Illinois Press guidelines are for sources. WP guidelines say that self-published sources are not acceptable. This is especially important for WorldConnect pages since they may change on a daily basis, and the information from the one that was used in the book you cite may change or disappear at any time.

2. Somewhere in some WP guideline I read that external links must conform to the same verifiability guidelines as sources. Can't find the WP guideline right now, but that's the rationale I was using in my deletion.

3. Other considerations: Sites to be avoided per WP:ELNO:

Sites with unverifiable research (fits WorldConnect to a T)
Personal web pages (RootsWeb is only the host, not the author or publisher, of the thousands of personal web pages contained in WorldConnect)
Sites that do not provide unique resources beyond what the articles would contain if they became featured articles (What, exactly, does this WorldConnect page contribute to the reader's understanding?)

75.6.10.105 (talk) 17:59, 6 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The fact is we link resources managed by individuals that could theoretically be subject to capricious change all the time. The first bullet is extracted from a point at WP:ELNO that refers to a "site that misleads the reader," which doesn't seem to apply here. The second one seems overcome by the fact that it's specifically cited as supplementary information in the article's best RS (Steel's bibliography, p. 281). The third one, from my experience at Wikipedia, doesn't work by consensus as the big sledgehammer it appears to be; Aristotle (an article critically watched by orders of magnitude more editors than this one) can link the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles as supplements to imperfect WP coverage, valuable because even a highly developed Wikipedia treatment has not (in this case) yet covered all the same nooks and crannies.

Consider that before I ever visited this article, it referred only to two genealogical publications. I'm sure these two publications are far below the highest levels of scholarly excellence, too, and I'd suggest that their basic similarity to the Rootsweb report be weighed in favor of this EL (which in all likelihood simply makes available online what we could read there - a classic appropriate use of an EL).

Of course I'd like to hear from more editors on this question. I'll add a label that I hope may constitute truth in advertising at least for now. Wareh (talk) 20:29, 6 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you conveniently dismiss WP guidelines to suit yourself, but the bottom line is that this EL provides absolutely no added value whatsoever to the reader. Did you even look at it? The sources for the information on the linked page are an email from someone in Vidalia, Louisiana and another tree on WorldConnect. Do you even know anything about the material on WorldConnect? (BTW, "WorldConnect" is not synonymous with "RootsWeb".) Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can upload any drivel whatsoever, and they do, all the time. One of the trees there has my father married to his mother. Thousands of others have people giving birth before they were born or after they died. There are trees with non-existent people that were created from foreign phrases that the contributors don't understand. And usually, as in this case, they cite as sources someone else's tree on WorldConnect. The amount of drivel on WorldConnect is amazing. Your only argument just doesn't hold water. Just because Steel throws reliability standards out the window is no reason that we should. 75.6.10.105 (talk) 20:57, 6 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I do find the point about the actual information covered being otherwise referenced in the article already important. As for Steel and his sources, I think it's too bad if he's really retailing such worthless sources, but in general, trying to combat misinformation in Wikipedia that comes by way of an RS (and whatever else is happening here, I'm not seeing a flood of better RS forthcoming) is also a losing proposition. (You're right, I have no information at all on the quality of Worldconnect apart from its regular citation as a "source" in the U. of Ill. P. book that serves as the only and most reliable source of information on its subject. I'm happy to take your word for it, but you can see that as a matter of policy it's a problem when we have to accept the word of a passing IP address over what the printed books are telling us--a problem to which the only real solution is the existence of better printed books with higher standards.)

Thanks for adding citations for statements that lacked them before. That was really the ideal solution to this all along. Wareh (talk) 22:45, 6 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Now having looked at the Daniels source in some detail, the WorldConnect link seems superfluous. Daniels has much more information than the WC tree, and is probably more definitive. 75.6.10.105 (talk) 22:59, 6 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]