Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 August 22

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August 22

How to be a singer?

I'm always wondering up until when I was a kid..............How to be a singer?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chandelia16 (talk • contribs) 02:48, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Do you mean, "I've been wondering ever since I was a kid?." Beach drifter (talk) 02:54, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

You are a kid first. Do you mean you wanted to be a singer when you were a foetus, but then stopped wanting to be when you became a kid ('up until')? It's easy to become a singer. Go to karaoke regularly and learn to sing your favourite songs, then you can start to make your own, if that's what you want. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 06:17, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

See The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If you listen, you'll hear Irma Thomas. Learned to sing by joining the choir. If you're immersed in better singers, you'll pick some skills up. Until then, if you move your lips right, nobody will know for a while. Less intimidating than starting solo. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:40, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia has an article titled singing that may help you in your research.--Jayron32 03:01, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Just about everyone learns to sing a bit just by imitating others. Beyond that, you can get training, although, some, like opera training, seems to go a bit overboard, IMHO, when they teach them to warble their voices instead of producing a pure note. (This technique may have been needed before electronic amplification, but seems as out of place now as grand sweeping body gestures in film, which we haven't needed since the close-up was invented to allow emotions to be displayed more naturally.) StuRat (talk) 22:59, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Even needing to produce pure notes is yesterday's worry. At least as far as a "recording artist" career goes. Not technically singing. InedibleHulk (talk) 21:11, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Unsourced Wikipedia articles undergoing deletion

Does it ever happen that a Wikipedia article gets deleted after getting nominated for deletion because nobody can find any sources for it, but it turns out that there were plenty of reliable sources and the Wikipedians just didn't know how to find them. From what Dr. Nikhil P. Patil wrote in Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Double circulatory system, I'm starting to wonder if that frequently happens. Perhaps the problem comes from the fact that so many research groups have the problem that almost nobody from it decides to join Wikipedia. I'm even wondering the research group that researched how to disable the creation of a Java update popup for downloading a virus made plenty of reliable sources about it but nobody participating in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Java update virus could find them because they weren't part of that research group. Blackbombchu (talk) 03:10, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

To be fair, it is really hard to find sources on this, even in the places where it should definitely appear. PubMed has zero papers that mention "double circulatory system" or "double loop circulatory system". Google scholar only gives a handful, and most are not reliable secondary sources. There is no shortage of papers on the circulatory systems of amphibians and reptiles, which are stated to have this double circulatory system, so it could be that research exists on the subject, but the title of the page is a name that no one uses. Someguy1221 (talk) 03:36, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

From poking around the literature, "double circulation" seems to be far more widely used to describe this system, on the order of 30 times more often. That's how you'll probably find your sources. Someguy1221 (talk) 04:00, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

The problem is that if there are inadequate sources for an article, we can't tell whether it's "real" or some kind of stupid hoax or other junk that some idiot decided to create for reasons of their own. So, it makes sense to delete it. How do we know that the subject is real unless we, ourselves, can look up the references and verify that it's real. If someone with a stack of good references comes along after the article has been deleted and wonders why it doesn't exist, they can recreate it easily enough - and with adequate referencing, it won't get deleted again. So the system does self-repair when real topics get deleted and references are eventually found to support a decent article. Topics where this has happened are getting rarer and rarer as the encyclopedia has now grown to encompass a very large fraction of human knowledge...and consequently, the "missing" articles are about increasingly odd-ball topics that fewer and fewer people care about. When I first started editing here, 10 years (and nearly 30,000 edits) ago, you could easily think of a new topic to write about and leap into creating a new article. These days, it's become incredibly hard to find something that's sufficiently notable and which has sufficient references available to justify a new article - and (predictably), the new article creation rate has dropped precipitously. SteveBaker (talk) 15:15, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

If there are no available sources, where did the information come from in the first place? Either the article is completely made up, or somebody found sources for it. (Even if it was written by someone with knowledge of the subject, they weren't born with that knowledge.)

It's not a question of an article being written with no sources, it's about articles being written with sources, but the original author not bothering to cite the sources. 74.113.53.42 (talk) 20:50, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

No, that's not true. There are plenty of subjects I could write about from personal knowledge alone...in many cases, I don't know of any references, and I'd have to actively go out and search the literature to find them. So it's not always about not bothering to cite sources that you already have - sometimes it's about finding sources for things you know to be true, but long ago forgot where you learned them.

In such cases, it's a often a problem of WP:NOR ("No original research"). Consider the article CD-ROM - it lacks a "History" section. I worked on the team that produced the first ever CD-ROM (it was a research project to produce an interactive dictionary - before even audio CD's had hit the store shelves). So I know bucketloads of stuff about the history of the CD-ROM, and I'd very much like to write History of the CD-ROM. But I can't put any of my personal knowledge into a Wikipedia article because (as far as I can tell) nobody from our team ever published that information outside of Philips Research Labs.

That's an incredibly common problem - experts in a subject come here to do a brain dump into an article, they don't have references for a lot of it - and are horrified when the article gets deleted. We can't just let "experts" write articles about their subject area without references because there is no way to check that their memories are serving them right - and no way to know whether they're really experts or just making stuff up.

SteveBaker (talk) 16:12, 25 August 2015 (UTC)