User talk:Sufferingfools

Welcome and a request

Welcome to Wikipedia! You've removed edits made by several editors dealing with payday lending and moneytree information and citations that meet Wikipedia guidelines for reliable sources. Please participate in the discussions started on talk pages: Talk:Margarita Prentice and Talk:Moneytree so other editors can understand your edits. Thanks! Flowanda | Talk 06:12, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

I want to second Flowanda's invitation that you participate in discussions. A few questions: 1) why is The Stranger article unreliable (I'm not saying I'm convinced it is reliable, but certainly the presumption for a large circulation paper cited elsewhere in the encyclopedia should be that it's "innocent until proven guilty," so to speak; 2) I've checked the links you cited as improper and fail to see the problem (I think the confusion might be that one citation seemed to support two sentences while in fact it only supported one); I've attempted to fix this by providing another citation regarding the voting record issue in question. Finally, please be aware when you're making edits of inadvertent formatting issues (e.g. in the most recent edit, which I've undone pending further conversation, a citation has been broken, a now empty section is left in the entry, and a "citation needed" tag is now misplaced. I'm confident we can all work together to improve the entry but believe discussion is certainly the way forward.Benzocane (talk) 01:22, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I think that the Stranger in general is unreliable. It is an underground paper of limited circulation that has a well-known bias against this person (although I do think that the Stranger can be relied upon for unencyclopedic and irrelevant facts like the Senator catches a ride in Hummer every once in a while). The links to the political contributions do not stand for the propositions that the Senator has accepted thousands of dollars from payday lenders. If that is not what you were citing then I have misunderstood your edit. Also very sorry for the editing problems. I'm working on broadband and lost my connection in the middle of editing. Will work more carefully in the future. I appreciate the offer to work cooperatively. I'm looking forward to it! Thanks! --Sufferingfools (talk) 02:03, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. On many keyboards, the tilde is entered by holding the Shift key, and pressing the key with the tilde pictured. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 19:29, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

{{helpme}}

I'm looking for a way to correctly cite and link to government sites (like the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission and the Washington State Legislative Bill Tracking Service) when, in order to correctly cite the entry or find the quoted material, a visitor would need to log on to the site and then conduct a search, entering both date and key word. Please see "Margarita Prentice" article for my feeble attempts to make this happen to-date. I would appreciate some guidance. Thanks!

I'm not much of a helper, but you could try reading WP:CITE. I'm not too experience in citing either. I'll removed the helpme template for now, if you can't find what your looking for, feel free to add it back. Hope this helps.--Sunny910910 ^{(talk|Contributions)} 01:37, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

And I'm sorry for not participating more in the conversations this week, but I haven't had the time needed to follow the extensive conversations and edits made since this weekend. And while directness is one of the things I like about conversations on Wikipedia, I'm thinking my initial message above was too blunt for even my tastes. Thanks for hanging in; I'll try to find the help you need. Flowanda | Talk 02:22, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I wish I knew the answer. The question, as I understand it, raises a more general issue of how one cites things that are behind password / login / registration, or that require user input and not just a URL.

I've gone to the article and edited the citation. That could be an example, although Wikipedia doesn't have an explicit guideline on how to do this as far as I can tell. Just use the common sense rule - cite to the most authoritative source possible, and give whatever instructions people need to find it if it's online. Note that I cited to the query page rather than the gateway page, which eliminates one step. I also changed the search term slightly because it seems to be doing partial matches. Anything with "money" in the name will come up if you type "money" so the "or" search is unnecessary. I took the instructions on how to do the search outside of the citation template and moved it to occur after that template but still in the reference. It's important to note when you performed the search, and also in the text of the article make clear that your source is a query and when that is accurate. Someone might read the article two years from now, by which time she will have received more money from the same people and the claim will be outdated.

This sidesteps an important question, which is whether information queried from a database is admissible as a source, anyway. If you look at WP:NOR Wikipedia encourages "secondary sources", meaning published material that describes something, rather than going to the original ("primary source") to find it for yourself. So, if you want to cite that there's a hole in the ground somewhere, in theory you sould not point to an aerial photo or a street address or google streets and tell people to look for themselves, but instead you should find a reliable published source like a newspaper or magazine. By extension, it is better if you can find a reputable newspaper to say that Money Tree and its employees only gave $950, than to point to the raw data saying the same thing. The reason why we on Wikipedia trust what a journalist says over what we see with our own two eyes is complex and subtle - so subtle that Wikipedia's most experienced editors are very upset and edit warring with each other and calling each other names over how to word the policy page on original research. I think it has to do with the fact that people don't always see the same thing when they look at the original. Perhaps one person sees a hole in the ground, and another person sees a puddle. Or comes back later and there is no hole. At least if you cite to the expert, there is only one possible interpretation. That same thing could apply to a public disclosure record. Perhaps there were other contributions but they got returned or mis-counted. Or a contribution was made under the name of a subsidiary or affiliate, and the source making the accusations found it but you did not know where to look. Or suppose sometimes the organization is spelled with a dash in it but those results aren't found. And so on. Also, we don't want Wikipedia to be a battleground for people with different opinions to try to prove their case by arguing original sources here. You can just imagine what kind of mischief would happen here if we actually allowed people on both sides of an issue to use articles and not just the article talk pages to try to win their point (it happens, but we forbid it). Better wait for the experts to pick the winning argument and simply report that here. But like I said, I am sidestepping that issue. On the simple question of how to cite a queried database as a source, I would just use common sense and be a specific and informative as possible. Wikidemo (talk) 16:06, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Wow! Thanks a bunch to all of you! This is a big help and I've learned a lot! --Sufferingfools (talk) 17:03, 13 December 2007 (UTC)