Wikipedia talk:ScotlandsPeople

Feedback based on my own experiences

I have used this with some success to fill in birth/marriage/death details in a few biographies of Scots I am interested in. To get the most reliable information (or even to be sure you have found the right person) you really need to see an image of the relevant record and they are only available online for records that are not so recent[1] However, for the 19th century (particularly after 1854) and up to 1911 in the censuses, and rather later for b/m/d, the information is detailed and the searching is efficient.

I could not find a way of directly referencing the specific document I wanted to cite and this is a disadvantage – I could only cite the relevant catalogue to search. I have previously used the WP:British Newspaper Archive where you can give a link to a highly specific URL taking you to the exact article being quoted. On the plus side the help provided in ScotlandsPeople is thorough and thoughtful and gives a good feel for the type of information you can expect to find and the ways in which it has been indexed. If you want to view a document more than once the site remembers and does not deduct further credits but if do the same search more than once you are charged each time (but only one credit).

I would have thought 50 credits would be ample for researching a specific person where you have good prior information (and broader research probably would count as WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH) but you'll use many hundreds if you get distracted into researching someone's family tree (as I have been!). Thincat (talk) 11:01, 13 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback (2)

Have spent a few happy days confirming/correcting/adding birth and death details for some Scottish golfers (mostly earlyish ones). As noted above this is basically WP:ORIGINALRESEARCH and, as such, is not ideal. Some sports have excellent databases of this sort of information (http://cricketarchive.com/ for cricket) but golf certainly isn't one of them, so this sort of research is probably the best we can do. Discovered one user who'd added random dates (in about 2007 I think) which I've corrected. In other cases the year of birth was uncertain since the professionals seemed to have had a habit of adjusting the year to either make themselves seem older or younger than they actually were.

Have spent most of the 1000 credits (281 left as I write this). Checked out perhaps 40 people so far. Some have drawn a blank, mostly births pre-1855. Some have been cheap, some expensive - 6th attempt before I found the right William Smith in Dundee.

Biographies I've edited recently: Jack Allan (golfer), Tommy Armour, Laurie Auchterlonie, William Auchterlonie, Laurie Ayton, Snr, Jim Barnes, James Braid (golfer), David Brown (golfer), Jack Burns (golfer), George Duncan (golfer), Bob Ferguson (golfer), Willie Fernie (golfer), James Foulis, Fred Herd, Sandy Herd, Jock Hutchison, Hugh Kirkaldy, George Low Sr., Willie Macfarlane, Bob Martin (golfer), Mungo Park (golfer), Willie Park, Jr., Willie Park, Sr., Horace Rawlins, Ted Ray (golfer), Alec Ross, Archie Simpson, Jack Simpson, Alex Smith (golfer), Willie Smith (golfer), Macdonald Smith, Andrew Strath, Harry Vardon, Jack White (golfer) + Walter Donaldson (snooker player)

New reference tool

There is a new Visual Editor reference feature in development called Citoid. It is designed to "auto-fill" references using a URL or DOI. We would really appreciate you testing whether TWL partners' references work in Citoid. Sharing your results will help the developers fix bugs and improve the system. If you have a few minutes, please visit the testing page for simple instructions on how to try this new tool. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:52, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Discontinued

Hi all. I'm sad to say that we are no longer able to distribute accounts to ScotlandsPeople. Despite the popular nature of ScotlandsPeople resources and our best efforts to convince our contacts of this, structural changes at their parent organisation(s) mean that there is no longer interest in continuing the partnership with The Wikipedia Library. Existing accounts should continue until tokens run out, but we are unfortunately unable to process new applications or, it seems, recent applications that had not yet been activated. If you are still interested in access to newspapers I recommend you take a look at Newspapers.com, Newspaperarchive.com, Gale, or one of our other available newspaper partners to see if they have content you may find useful. Let me know if you have any questions. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 19:44, 9 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]