Talk:Andrew Oddy

Sources

I have now twice removed the same sources from this article. Prabook is not an acceptable source, as has been discussed at WP:RSN, and self-published websites are reliable only for the barest facts about themselves. You could use his site to verify his date of birth (although some people even fudge that, such as some well-known actors); you can't use it to support claims about what he did etc. - Sitush (talk) 18:24, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

@Usernameunique: you have been editing Wikipedia for over a year now but you are still not citing properly. We need footnotes and we need reliable sources. The burden is upon you. Please read WP:SPS, WP:PRIMARY, WP:RS and WP:Citing sources, otherwise you may find your work is stripped back yet again. - Sitush (talk) 19:54, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

@Sitush: I'll counter you with Wikipedia:Inline citation#When you must use inline citations. The articles in question do not a) include direct quotations, b) include statements that have been challenged, c) include statements that are likely to be challenged, or d) include contentious material about living persons. "Technically, if an article contains none of these four types of material, then it is not required by any policy to name any sources at all, either as inline citations or as general references." All the best. --Usernameunique (talk) 03:38, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

I challenged, therefore you should provide. Look, use your noodle: if you do it in the first place then you save the reader the hassle. You're the one who is familiar with the sources you use, not them. Your cavalier attitude to this sort of thing is driving me daft, and that takes some doing after > 180,000 contributions here. - Sitush (talk) 08:57, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Expansion

This article has been substantially expanded but has numerous additional problems now. It is mainly reliant on Oddy's own writings, it contains far too much detail of a tangential type, it includes silly "chat" stuff (I've removed a couple of seemingly jokey asides), it is almost certainly being edited by someone with a major conflict of interest, and I don't think the citations even support a lot of what is said. - Sitush (talk) 12:36, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

What we seem to have is a lot of detail about what he did, even after my pruning, that is sourced directly to the man himself. Yet we do not have sources for the most basic biographical stuff. It is a very odd situation and makes it read more like a self-penned tribute than a biography. - Sitush (talk) 15:19, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

I'm not going to waste my time cleaning up any more citations until we have some sort of consensus regarding just how much self-sourced info should be in this article. I understand why so much is used but that doesn't make it right. It sits very uncomfortably with me. - Sitush (talk) 15:57, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

When I was trying to edit the citations as advised by you, half the entry has been lost. I think that sitush and I may have been editing at the same time. I have not re-instated any text that has been edited out by others, but I may unwittingly have re-edited footnotes if we were working at the same time. I do not know what to do now. I can see things wrong with the citations and Who's Who could be used for career details, if that is an acceptable source. Can you recover what has been lost? Do you want to? Do you want more publications added? (There is a whole raft of work on the Sutton Hoo burial and on early Islamic coinage which is recognized internationally.) abila.pao — Preceding unsigned comment added by Abila.pao (talk • contribs) 17:19, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

We really need sources about him, not ones by him. I suspect the Sutton Hoo stuff will mostly fall into the latter category. AS for publications, well, it is getting messy because so many of them are already cited. I am at a bit of a loss here. - Sitush (talk) 18:26, 21 August 2017 (UTC)