User talk:Friedel (EL)/European Library

Suggestion on sources

I realize that you are relatively new to the community, however I would like to note that the footnotes are not very good citations for any scholarly writing. I would suggest filling out the complete bibliographic information as you would use in any scholarly paper. On help citing things, please see WP:Citing Sources. Also, I want to remind you of our WP:Verifiability policy's requirement that you use Secondary sources for the bulk of the information about organizations (not self published stuff). If you have any questions, please feel free to post here, and I or someone else will respond, Sadads (talk) 13:13, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Sadads, I understand your point of view and I can certainly try to fix up the formating on the footnotes. About using secondary sources, in terms of factual information about The European Library, isn't the organisation itself the best source of that information? Some examples:

1)Traffic numbers on our website: The source is our 2009 annual report. Leaving aside the issue that it's not online yet (it will be soon and I will provide a link), isn't our annual report the most relevant source for that figure (rather than a news report, for example, that would only get the information from us anyway)? 2)Member libraries: Who better to say who our members are than the organization itself?

Maybe the problem is that some of the references shouldn't be references at all, but rather external links? For example, links to the virtual exhibitions or the archived websites of historical projects that are no longer active?

Thanks for any clarification. There is a lot to learn when you first jump into Wikipedia!

Friedel (EL) (talk) 14:43, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

The 2009 annual report is OK, but it is not a third-party source, which mean the info might not be important. If a newspaper includes the fact in a news article, you should cite that instead. Ssame with member libraries. Also, references should always be presented in inline citations, and embedded citations are strongly discouraged. Kayau Voting IS evil 14:52, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

What about the descriptions of work that we submit to the European commission? Would that be considered a good reference? They are quite official. Partners sometimes mention our updates on their websites, but they are not exactly "independent" sources of info and they only get the info from us anyway. We are not the kind of organisation that gets so much "mainstream" press attention so it's difficult. There are occasional journal articles but perhaps only 2 a year and they quickly become outdated.

I will read up on inline vs embedded citations :) Friedel (EL) (talk) 15:04, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the Commission, but please note that if you find sourcing difficult, this may raise questions of notability. In any case, you should probably look for more journal articles... Kayau Voting IS evil 15:10, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

OK, so - for example, this newspaper article would be a better reference to cite about how many members we have rather than our own site? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09stream.html

Thanks for taking the time to help. It's appreciated.

Friedel (EL) (talk) 16:00, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes, exactly, except you still need some more information on the source itself. so the citation could look like

Singer, Natasha "Playing Catch-Up in a Digital Library Race." New York Times, January 8, 2011. Accessed January 17, 2011.

It could be in any style format, examples incl. APA, MLA, Chicago,as long as you are consistant, but our readers need to know which websites and sources we are providing them links to before they click on the link itself. The more the information you can give, the better, and if you want you can try activating WP:RefTools in the gadget section of your user preferences, Sadads (talk) 17:03, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Sadads. I'll work on cleaning up the article and trying to find as many references as I can. I've never edited a Wiki article before and I'm still trying to get my head around it, so I appreciate your help. Friedel (EL) (talk) 07:34, 18 January 2011 (UTC)