Talk:Sarah Coysh

A fact from Sarah Coysh appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 12 July 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Elisha Coysh, great-grandfather of Sarah Coysh, was a physician renowned for his care of victims of the Great Plague of London?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2012/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Sarah Coysh.

Wikipedia

Biography

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

Wales Low‑importance

	Wales portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Wales, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Wales 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.WalesWikipedia:WikiProject WalesTemplate:WikiProject WalesWales articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Anne (talk) 00:18, 3 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

St Saviour's Denmark Park

This is a thoroughly excellent article and was a good read. However 'St Saviour's Denmark Park' was not the 'St Saviour's Southwark the present Southwark Cathedral building. The article shows that the family was resident in both the parishes of St Mary Magdalen at Bermondsey and that of St Giles, Camberwell area. 'Denmark Park/ Denmark Road and Denmark Hill' are in the Myatt's Fields area of Camberwell and that is the location of the 'St Saviour's' mentioned. This was one of two St Saviour's churches in Camberwell being 'daughter' churches of St Giles's. I am a local historian and served on both of the Camberwell United and Mary Magdalen United charities Tony S. 212.139.230.197 (talk) 07:10, 12 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Primary sources

With this edit [1], and those that followed, a large amount of text was removed from the article with edit summary "stubbify - this is all Original Research, citing unpublished primary documents". I have instead restored that text and tagged the article for improvement. The removal of text made redirects including James James (Monmouth) confusing; made the last line of the lead irrelevant; and was disproportionate. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:33, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

An article that is almost entirely WP:OR doesn't just need to be 'improved'. Wikipedia is not a place to publish your own personal research, even under the guise of it being there only until someone at some indeterminate point in the future replaces it with more acceptable material. The best way to improve the article is to start from scratch and rebuild clean, or else all of that (forbidden by a core policy, remember) WP:OR is going to be there indefinitely, which for an article on someone this obscure basically means forever. If this person is notable, it shouldn't be any problem putting together a non-WP:OR article. If it does prove a challenge then maybe the person isn't notable enough for an article. Also, each article should stand on its own, based on logic and criteria inherent to that page. If the redirect is no longer relevant, that is a reason to remove the redirect, retarget it, or make a new article that better serves as a target (if one can do so without again violating WP:OR). It is not a good reason to place or retain tangential WP:OR material in an article just so a redirect has somewhere to point - that is the cart pulling the horse. Agricolae (talk) 22:25, 13 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Agricolae:. I understand, but in this case it is not as if a large tract of material is entirely unsourced. The references appear to be parish registers which clearly exist, although their precise identity is not clear. Primary sources can be used with care and the author has made an effort to cite those primary sources. I'm not an ancestry.com subscriber, nor am I involved in this article (I came here while tidying up things called "James James"). I just think that deletion of a substantive part of the article, especially without tidying up the consequences afterwards, is over-the-top. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 07:30, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Parish registers do exist, but identifying a name in a parish register with any particular historical figure is always a matter of interpretation - it is invariably WP:OR. If you have a secondary source that reaches the conclusion, then the primary source can indeed be used with caution to supplement that conclusion, but that doesn't mean an article should be written exclusively from primary sources, as this was. This was a clear case of someone uploading their personal research project, and there is nothing over the top in stubbifying such essays. Agricolae (talk) 13:55, 14 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]