User talk:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example

specificity

Not sure if this talk page will be noticed, but feedback on this example:

• Would it be possible to make that reference more specific? What work of the NGIA is this data from, and more importantly, what date is it from? These articles will need to be updated and maintained decades from now, possibly by hand or possibly by bot, so that sort of information will be important to keep track of.
• Infobox Settlement is vast. I don't know which fields are "more important" offhand, but perhaps you could look into having Frizpoll eliminate some of the lesser-used parameters entirely when they're not used in the auto-generated article itself? Something like "population_blank2_title" is likely only used in a handful of cases. Bryan Derksen (talk) 16:20, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

unverifiable source and inappropriate external link

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example&diff=215336494&oldid=214708113

The source in not a source that users can use to verify: http://www.nga.mil/portal/site/nga01/index.jsp?site=my_collection&client=my_collection&output=xml_no_dtd&epi-content=GOOGLE_SEARCH&q=Aju&btnG=Go says they can't find it there and your link is to a wikipedia page and not to a source for the claim

• Search for Aju in the MSN Encarta atlas - comment : This is totally inappropriate

WAS 4.250 (talk) 22:17, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Geobox vs. Infobox Settlement

The {{Geobox}} equivalent for this example is:

{{Geobox|Village|
| name               = Aju
| native_name        = 
| country_type       = [[List of countries|Country]]
| country            = Burma
| country_flag       = true
| state_type         = [[Administrative divisions of Burma|State]]
| state              = [[Kachin State|Kachin]]
| state_flag         = 
| district           = [[Myitkyina District|Myitkyina]]
| municipality_type  = Township
| municipality       = [[Waingmaw Township|Waingmaw]]
| lat_d              = 25 
| lat_m              = 32
| lat_NS             = N 
| long_d             = 98
| long_m             = 1
| long_EW            = E
| elevation          = 250 
| population_as_of   =
| population         =
| timezone           = MMT
| utc_offset         = +6:30
| map                = Myanmar-outline-map.png
| map_caption        = Location of Aju within Burma
| map_locator        = Burma
}}

— Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 07:01, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Reference format

Hey Fritzpoll. I'm not sure how I feel about the proposal overall but I'm not going to comment on that here. However, for purposes of the reference, (as already suggested but very generally at the top of this page) I would think it should be much more specific, use our best referencing technique, and certainly link to the external URL of the specific page of the website being referenced and not to the Wikipedia article on the agency. Citations to other Wikipedia articles are generally not acceptable as references, at all, and references should always be to the specific place where the datat is contained. A link to the Wikipedia article doesn't function as a "reference" because that article doesn't verify the information you are citing it for containing. I suggest you use:

<ref>{{Cite web |url= |title= |accessdate=2008-06-02 |publisher= |date= }}</ref>
==References==
{{Reflist}} ("R", not {{"r"eflist}})

--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:44, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, including a link to a Wikipedia article about the source in question isn't really a problem, especially if there's no online version. In this case it's quite obvious that the reference's meaning is not "I got this information from this Wikipedia article", it's "I got this information from the source that is described in this Wikipedia article." The reference is still far too vague, though. Bryan Derksen (talk) 18:20, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

It a big problem, especially if we're talking about a huge number of articles (and this is the biggest addition ever). It may be quite obvious that it doesn't mean that the information comes from the Wikipedia article, but that's not the issue. References need to provide exactly where they comes from so users can check the material themselves.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I think we're in violent agreement with each other. :) I wasn't saying the current example's reference didn't have a problem, just that the problem was not the presence of a link to a Wikipedia article. It's the lack of additional information beyond that. Bryan Derksen (talk) 06:24, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

En garde! yes, I think we're in the midst of a misubnderstanding. So let me see if I can sum up. You're saying that it's not a problem if a reference which points to the specific place the information comes from also contains a link to the Wikipedia article; that having that link in the reference is not a problem, in and of itself such as is common in, for example, in a {{cite book}} template where one wikilinks the name of the book being cited), and I thought you were saying that it's not a problem if the link is where the reference points to rather than the specific place. Does that come close? If so, then we're not disagreeing at all:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 12:34, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

I think so. :) I've actually come across people stripping perfectly good references out of articles because, in addition to the standard bibliographic information, a link to a Wikipedia article was also included. So I wanted to make sure that sort of misunderstanding wasn't going to happen here too. As long as the reference satisfies our need for verifiability any other links and information it contains is just gravy. Bryan Derksen (talk) 23:00, 5 June 2008 (UTC)