User talk:Mikeblas/Archives/2020/April

Nielsen Ratings

Hi,

I've been adding Nielsen ratings to TV show pages here on Wikipedia for about 6 years now, and am a huge proponent of ensuring the accuracy of the numbers. I must say that I'm very confused by your edits across a number of TV show pages where you removed citations to tv-aholics.blogspot.com, citing that it was a "personal blog." While normally I would totally agree with you about citing personal blogs, in this case I think there was an oversight. The blog is merely the platform by which scanned copies of the USA Today are posted. We are citing USA Today as the source, not the blog itself. USA Today has deleted all of their Nielsen ratings online and this blog houses the only publicly available copies of this data on the internet. The only other place they exist is on microfilm. Can we discuss this ? Thank you. Rswallis10 (talk) 19:20, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

I brought the issue of these references up at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Television#tvaholics_blog_as_Reliable_source?. There are two problems. One is that tvaholics is a self-published blog, and therefore not a usable, reliable source per WP:SELFPUBLISH. As you describe, some of the links are to PDF scans of articles from the USA Today newsppaer. In these cases, the problem is a bit deeper. The scans republish copyrighted material, apparently without any right to do so. Wikipedia forbids copyvio material, and also forbids linking to external copyvio material, per WP:COPYVIO. Thus, links to the scans of the articles can't be used.

Thus, another source must be found. Maybe the publisher has an online archive of the articles. Or, {{cite news}} references can be used to identify the printed reference: the newspaper title, its publication date, the page where the information appears, the title of the article, and its author (if available). There are probably lots of other ways to source the material, but those are the ones that I can think of at the moment. Thing is, though, we can't link to WP:COPYVIO ever, and WP:SELFPUBLISH material can't be used, either. I'll be removing those links again so the articles comply with Wikipedia policy. -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:38, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

I dont have a dog in this hunt, but have reverted these four edits to the stable version. You two need to agree on a place other than here and discuss. Mikeblas, you need to reach consensus, not keep reverting. Your interpretation of policy seems strained, to say the least. ----Dr.Margi ✉ 01:05, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

WP:SELFPUBLISH and WP:COPYVIO are pretty clear; the latter says explicitly "Copyright infringing material should also not be linked to" so I'm not sure what other interpretation is possible. The websites in question pretty clearly don't have permission to republish the material in question. Plenty of other similar topics reference this same information directly to the source as I suggest above, and that's what should be done here.

The self-published issue was previously discussed at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Television#tvaholics_blog_as_Reliable_source?. We can reconvene there, if further discussion is necessary.

But, since copyvio is involved, why do you think the offending links shouldn't be expeditiously removed? -- Mikeblas (talk) 02:23, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Brasilia - what were you trying to do?

edit summary says you fixed the reference but as far as I can tell you just deleted the paragraph break. It also says page needed, but you didn't flag it. and the statement is that the guy wrote a book about Brasilia and the reference is the book he wrote. There is no page needed. The name is in the title! LMK, am confused Elinruby (talk) 07:05, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Here is the edit that I made.

I didn't delete a paragraph break. In the paragraph that begins "An interesting analysis can be made ...", a reference named <ref name=Holston> had been added. This reference defined there was different than the existing reference named "Holston", which is defined in the paragraph that begins "Paranoá Lake, a large artificial lake, ...". The presence of two different reference definitions with the same name obscures the references, and adds this text to the references footnote list at the bottom of the article: "Cite error: The named reference "Holston" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page)." That error renders in red letters to draw attention to the referencing problem, as visible in this version. The page is also added to Category:Pages with duplicate reference names.

In my edit, I removed the name Holston from the reference defined in the "interesting analysis" paragraph. That removes the name, and lets the two different definitions coexist, each getting its own entry in the references footnote list.

I added the {{page needed}} template because the "interesting analysis" reference to this book doesn't include a page number for the information being cited. Page numbers are very useful when verifying references -- otherwise, someone must read the whole book (or get lucky searching ...) to verify the reference. Note that the second reference to the book does include a page number parameter in the reference.

Hope that helps; let me know if you have any questions! -- Mikeblas (talk) 13:30, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

Amy Shark

Regarding your recent edit here, it wasn't me who added the 2020 ARIA Accreditations reference, I merely edited it as per the standard prose (em dashes instead of hyphens, a space in between each pipe/parameter). It wasn't my edit that caused any errors on the page (as far as I'm aware).

No hard feelings though, seems to be an honest mistake.

Cheers, Sean Stephens (talk) 04:27, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Never mind actually, I've just noticed that my edit did actually cause a reference error. Sorry about that, it didn't show that an error message when I previewed my edit. My apologies.

Sorry for the misunderstanding –Sean Stephens (talk) 04:32, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

No worries at all. Referencing is quite byzantine and confusing, so sometimes it takes a couple tries to get it sorted out. (And it's certainly happened that I fingered the wrong person in my own analysis!) -- Mikeblas (talk) 13:50, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Results of the 1874–75 New South Wales colonial election

Thanks for your edit to Results of the 1874–75 New South Wales colonial election - this is just a quick note as to why I have reverted it. The character between the number & reference is not a non printing or control character but rather a hair space per MOS:REFSPACE because with no punctuation the reference made the number difficult to read. I had previously used   however the minor fixes in AWB then converts them. Thanks for picking up & correcting my stuff up on the 1869–70 page - as you correctly surmised I had included the wrong year which would create confusing errors. --Find bruce (talk) 03:32, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation! Have you considered using {{hsp}} instead of the actual hair space character? The former seems clear and deliberate to me; the latter doesn't render clearly, isn't visible in the editor, and seems to have a couple of other problems. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:25, 29 April 2020 (UTC)