Talk:Harriet Isabel Adams

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Date of birth

Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments1 person in discussion

I can only find one source for the 1863 date of birth - author Caroline Fuchs - and it seems she attributes the information to a blog, so I'm not sure about it's reliability. Has anyone else found any sources? This source makes it seem like a Harriet Isabel Adams died in 1952 at age 90, but I'm not sure if this is the same person. And the date of birth seems like it was unsourced when it was added to the article. - Whisperjanes (talk) 18:37, 18 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

With a further look, I wonder if some of the sourcing in the article veers into WP:OR territory. Many of the sources mention an "H. Isabel Adams" or a "Harriet Isabel Adams", but contain no further identifying information that verifies its the same person. To summarize what I've found:

Some of the books attributed to her in the article are sourced to only the book itself with the author "H. Isabel Adams".
The date of birth and death seem to come from this source, where it mentions a Times obituary of a Harriet Isabel Adams' (died 1952 at age 90, with no mention of the exact birth). I thought this might be the right Harriet Isabel Adams, but the only identifying info in this obit is a husband, mother, and father, which, in the article, are also only (circularly) sourced to this obituary.
The only info I could find on her possible birth are from author Caroline Fuchs,[1][2] who seems to source a blog for her sparse information on "Harriet Isabel Adams".

Many of the sources in the article (and beyond), seem to have questionable reliability. The only place I've found some of this information repeated is this blog post, which was written after the other (above) blog post and Fuchs' biography. Again, this source doesn't seem very reliable either.

So far, it seems correct that "H." stood for Harriet (although all the early sources I could find about her and her book don't specify her first name). Credits for her 1907 book list her as "H. Isabel Adams, F.L.S.",[3] which seems to stand for Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. And there was a Harriet Isabel Adams elected as a fellow in 1906.[4] So all of that info, plus that she illustrated Wild Flowers of the British Isles, seems correct in the article (although the former feels a bit OR).

If anyone can find any additional sources, that'd be a great help. I'm at the point of thinking post-2014 sources might not be very reliable if they used Caroline Fuchs, the original blog, or Wikipedia (thinking the original citations here made the info reliable) as sources. Anyone's thoughts on this would be appreciated. - Whisperjanes (talk) 19:39, 18 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

For now, I've gone ahead and removed the most questionable sources (the Times obituary and the illustrations only credited to "H. Isabel Adams") and the biographical info taken from them. - Whisperjanes (talk) 10:13, 15 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

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