OJWay

Ways to improve Ourselves to Know

Hello, OJWay,

Thank you for creating Ourselves to Know.

I have tagged the page as having some issues to fix, as a part of our page curation process and note that:

You may wish to add from this source to balance out the article [1]

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Schminnte (talk • contribs) 12:53, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

@Schminnte: - Thank you for helping me improve this article. I am a member of the John O'Hara Society - a pretty informal group of fans of the author (1905 - 1970). I have asked for help in our Facebook Group to improve this article, and I suggested this: Ideas to improve the page include: uploading a cover image, adding a section on "Critical Reception"; another section on "Depiction of the American Civil War"; add references to the "Bank Panic of 1907"; discuss parallels between "Ourselves to Know" and Nabokov's "Lolita". How does all that sound?

Meanwhile, I've decided to create a new article on his novella "A Family Party" because the Local Reads book club in Pottsville, PA (O'Hara's birthplace and the setting of his best work - under the alias of Gibbsville, PA) is discussing it at its Aug. 30 meeting. I'm asking someone who'll be there to request readers at the meeting club meeting to edit that article. But I won't ignore "Ourselves to Know".

Also, I invite you to read some of the works of John O'Hara because he's really good - he's been called addictive. The best place to start is his novel "Appointment in Samarra". If you like it, I invite you to join the John O'Hara Society too! OJWay (talk) 05:25, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

That generally sounds fine, as long as you and other society members remember that on Wikipedia, you have to remain neutral and cite reliable sources. Also be aware that some Wikipedians might think this constitutes a conflict of interest. Schminnte (talk • contribs) 07:34, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

@Schminnte:We have no financial interest in O'Hara, we just appreciate him as a great 20th century novelist whose works should be preserved and studied. He had tremendous popular appeal, sold millions and millions of books, and there is a lot of contemporary documentation from leading publications we can cite in the form of reviews, articles, academic criticism, and quite a few published biographies. Meanwhile, I've now published my article on "A Family Party", which will have many of the same deficiencies as "Ourselves to Know". My expectation is that over time I and other Wikipedia contributors will get these pages to be as thorough as the Wikipedia article on "The Great Gatsby". Well, maybe that's more aspiration than expectation, but if you liked Gatsby (and also if you liked the TV Show Mad Men) then you'll probably like O'Hara.

In any case, I think I'm having problems with my citations of books in "A Family Party". I tried to follow the documentation on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_book - Can you tell me if I did anything wrong?

And I truly appreciate your help. I share your commitment to keeping Wikipedia neutral, reliable, and informative. Thanks for your attention. OJWay (talk) 07:50, 13 August 2023 (UTC)

Apart from the fact that the book citation should be in the reference section, I think you should use a footnote to cite it. You can do this by enclosing the templete ({{cite book|..........}}) In tags like this: <ref>{{cite book|.....}}</ref> If you have any more questions, see Help:Referencing for beginners, or contact me here or on my talk page (linked in my signature). Thanks, Schminnte (talk • contribs) 08:10, 13 August 2023 (UTC)