Talk:The Portland Black Panthers

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Biggest Little City.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:14, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Article feedback

Hi Biggest Little City, I wanted to give you some feedback about the article. First things first, I wanted to give you some feedback on the sourcing.

I've removed a few sources that didn't mention the book in specific, as there were already other sources that did and backed up the claim in the article. Be careful of sources that only briefly mention the book or sourcing that doesn't mention it at all. Neither of these can show notability for the book, as one doesn't go into any depth and the other doesn't mention the book itself. To assert notability the source has to be about the book, as it doesn't inherit notability from the events it discusses. I've streamlined some of the sourcing - I've removed the ones mentioned above, however I've also removed the links to the authors' workplace bios since the information was already in the publisher page with the reviews. It makes it easier for incoming people to look through the sourcing and see what is what - which also makes it easier for them to see that the book is notable.

Also be cautious of primary sources - these can't show notability because they're released by the people, businesses, and so on that are affiliated with them. Sometimes they can direct you towards non-primary sources, as in the case of pages that list reviews, but you would still need to verify that the review is one that can be used. Something to be cautious of when it comes to books are book blurbs. Book blurbs are 1-3 sentence statements that the publisher solicits from a specific person. These are always positive and in many cases are by people who work with the publisher, know the author(s), or are otherwise quotes by people who were specifically approached with a request to write a snappy short quote that would help sell the book. On Wikipedia these are seen as primary sources regardless of who the quote comes from, unless it can be proven that it came from a longer review published elsewhere. You can usually tell when something is a book blurb because it won't have any information about where the quote was published - it'll just have the person's information, like "John Smith, author of That Book" or "Jane Smith, President of That Organization". In the case of this source, the only ones that could potentially be considered independent reliable sources are the ones published by the East Oregonian (which is already on the page), Western Historical Quarterly, and Pacific Northwest Quarterly. It's usually better to track down the reviews and link to them directly, since that way we can verify that they're reviews and not blurbs, plus that they're reviewed in places that would be seen as independent of the authors and the publisher.

Now all of that said, you did a great job of identifying a book that should have an article on Wikipedia but didn't for whatever reason. There's still room for expansion here, so the sky is the limit. I'm attaching a link to our brochure on editing book articles since that has a lot of helpful information and can also give you some ideas on what you may want to add to the article. Let me know on my talk page if I can help you any! Book articles are one of my favorite things to edit on Wikipedia. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:31, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

References please!

Interesting article, but can you please add sources otherwise editors may tag it for lack of references. You just cannot keep adding content without sources! Senegambianamestudy (talk) 01:54, 13 March 2018 (UTC)