User talk:Elgallow

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16:03, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

Policy problems with recent edits

Thanks for your interest in the articles Murder of Tess Richey and Death of Alloura Wells. I cleaned up your edits quite a bit. While you made some good changes, I feel that overall your edits introduced more problems to the articles. Some issues:

Addition of uncited and potentially harmful information, specifically he was incarcerated during the time Wells would have likely died. This is in violation of biographies of living persons policy. An article can't state that someone was incarcerated without an inline citation to a reliable source, as this could be potentially damaging to the person in question. I immediately removed this from the article. If you have a reliable secondary source, feel free to put it back with an inline citation.
Separating inline citations from the statements being supported. This hinders verification and is damaging to the encyclopedia. (I am not aware of any policy or guideline requiring inline citations to be at the end of sentences or paragraphs.) It's best to have the citation right at the fact that's being supported, especially with contentious material.
Combining statements from different sources, which we call synthesis of reliable sources. Although it may read better, combining sources can be misleading and can easily change the meaning of the original statements. It's better to state each fact and let the reader connect them and draw their own conclusions. That's one of the reasons why I had inline citations in mid-sentence, so that the individual statements did not get muddled. I felt that this was especially important given the subject nature of the articles.
Overlinking, such as linking to 2010–2017 Toronto serial homicides twice in one sentence, many links to Toronto, and links to common things like coroner and spokesperson. Similarly, don't link both places in North Bay, Ontario. The first links to the second in its lead sentence, so just link to the more specific article. It's subjective, but try to restrict linking to things the reader is likely to be interested in. Less is more (fewer links are more effective).
Lots of MOS cleanup, like the erroneous addition of commas to DMY dates (MOS:DATEFORMAT), and spaces or missing punctuation where inline citations had been moved.

I hope that this feedback is useful for you. Happy editing! – Reidgreg (talk) 13:16, 23 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hey thanks for the feedback! I'm glad that people are looking at the article since it didn't seem to recieve any attention for over a year so I'm happy that it's still being looked after. As per the comment regarding Alloua's boyfriend, I did get that information from The Canadian True Crome Podcast (https://canadiantruecrime.ca/episodes/2020/7/12/72-the-death-of-alloura-wells), which I personally think is well researched, but you're right, I should have verifyed that with the sources. I will go through them to find the source. Thanks again! --Elgallow (talk) 23:22, 24 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

From what I can see (from the podcast's about page) it's a tertiary source (like Wikipedia), which means that rather than doing original research or journalism that it is aggregating information from reliable secondary sources. If you can identify the RSS for the fact and use that, then you can skip having to determine if the podcast itself is a reliable source.

I wrote the Alloura Wells and Tess Richey articles a couple years ago when I did a big expansion on the Bruce McArthur article. I've only been making small updates since then; I haven't quite found the time to systematically overhaul all three of them. You're welcome to work on them; even small improvements are improvements. – Reidgreg (talk) 10:13, 27 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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