Talk:"A" Is for Alibi

Possible expansion

I realize this edit was against WP:CITEVAR but I'd like to expand this article and could do so fairly quickly. BUT - I've never really understood LDR refs and find them difficult to work with. What does "sbi080701" mean - how does an editor know that refers to the Santa Barbara Independent? Any chance we could lose the LDR, at least during the expansion? Truthkeeper (talk) 16:43, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

List-defined references are actually fairly straight-forward, if you follow the examples currently in the article. It's no different from how you added that new reference the other day with a named ref-tag for second use, only the bulky citation is stored at the bottom of the text in the reflist. There's nothing magic about the names (other than that they can never be all-numeric). For news sources, I prefer to use a three-letter identifier for the newspaper plus the date. So that Santa Barbara Independent article from 2008-07-01 gets a "sbi080701" tag. I keep the references in the reflist in chronological order so an editor reading the raw text can easily find it in the list. It's a much cleaner system than leaving bulky citations littering the text and much easier to find than hunting for a cited reference somewhere else in a long article full of citations. If you want to use another naming scheme for references you add, that's completely fine, as long as they're not themselves overly long and distracting. - Dravecky (talk) 19:59, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for explaining the system for the named refs, that kind of threw me. LDR is better to keep clutter out of the edit window, but I hardly ever use citation templates so it's not usually an issue. I'll go with this system but first need to search for sources and will probably be adding them to a "further reading" section until I actually use them. Truthkeeper (talk) 20:29, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Truthkeeper88 the article has been modified to use inline citations, with a numbered ref list under References. References that might be used more than once begin with ref name=LJ1982, for example, for the Library Journal 1982 article. (side note, no need for quotes around a ref name if only letters and numbers are used in the ref name.) To improve this article it needs the references quoted and used inline (the reference number shows up in the text and in full in the Reference list at the end of the article). These quotes build up notability, why the article deserves to be in Wikipedia. I started a Review section, moved text into Publication history, and Title sections. The lead is modified; that part, the first paragraph(s) a reader sees, is meant to be highlights or summary of the article, never saying words not already in the article. If you still have interest in this novel, can you find out why the newspaper article from Austin in 1994 was cited? As I could not find the text on line with a cursory search, I commented it out -- meaning the reference is on the page if you look to edit it, but it does not show up on the finished page. Comments begin with !-- and end with --, using < and > to surround the comment text. These novels deserve far better articles in my view. --Prairieplant (talk) 00:43, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi Prairieplant, (formerly Truthkeeper here), it's ok to have a cited sentence in the lead and that American Statesman article looks like it might be interesting so I uncommented it and put it back for now. If you prefer, it can go to the "Further reading" section. I pulled a few articles some days ago and placed them into a "Further reading" section on the Sue Grafton page, (for anyone to use) and copied a couple over here, which, off the top of my head, have the most material about this book. In reply to the query in your edit summary: yes, I would like to work on the all the articles in the series. Will pick at them a little bit at a time as I have a chance. Thanks for getting things going, it's wonderful to see this taking shape. Victoriaearle (tk) 23:56, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Victoriaearle That is great that you will work on the articles. Of course it is okay to have an inline citation on a sentence in the lead, but what is being cited in the very first sentence? I could not figure that out. Pretty much every article has sources on the lead, and some of those articles could have been put to better use supplying quotes for reviews, if they were reviews and not simply author interviews. I did go through each article for little things I could do, like infobox, check if the ISBN goes to the correct book, check if the url in the references for more recently written books are still good. Several dead links, which that clever bot may find using Wayback machine. I had not understood that first remark above about list-defined references, but now I think that means using ref= after Reflist, putting the fully detailed references there. I found that confusing, so I changed those to what is more familiar to me, having the full reference in the text, using the ref name if needed again. I moved some text out of one article and into the article on the author, from the Y book, I think. It is noted in the Sue Grafton article that the text came from the article, but I forgot to note it at the article, I think. It will be good to see all the plot summaries and the Reviews/Critical reception/Literary significance sections. --Prairieplant (talk) 02:53, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi Prairieplant, back in the day when the article still looked like this, it looks like that American Statesman article was used as a source for the novel's publication date, but we don't need to keep it. I'd hoped to find it to see whether it has any other interesting information, but no luck, so I've now deleted it. Also, thanks for sorting out Montecito vs. Santa Barbara on the bio; somewhere I'd read she died in Montecito which confused me because she would have had to be at home. It makes much more sense that she was in Cottage Hospital, and yes, that is in Santa Barbara. Finally, huge apologies for belated replies. It's hard to get here these days, but I'll pitch in when I can. Victoriaearle (tk) 17:34, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Victoriaearle-- That is looking better, sorry the article itself cannot be found. I found this link, the list of all the reviews of Sue Grafton titles by Publishers Weekly. It looks they started writing reviews at C Is for Corpse, so it will not help for this article but it will for many of the novels. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/authorpage/sue-grafton.html Yes, that CNN article was helpful with the exact location of death, as Santa Barbara is a county and a city, like Los Angeles, and Montecito is an unincorporated place (and a Census designated place) in Santa Barbara County, and when news sources say Santa Barbara, do they mean the city or the much larger county? CNN solved that problem. I hope there are more reviews for this book -- Kirkus Reviews liked it enough to write a "keep at it, great start" kind of review. Well, time will tell. I do not get on Wikipedia daily, either. --Prairieplant (talk) 21:19, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Los Angeles Times has a similar collection of links to articles it has written about Sue Grafton or her books. http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/sue-grafton No review for the first book, just mentions of it in reviews of later novels. New York Times started with the first novel, as Library Journal quoted. Chicago Tribune has no summary page either. Enough for now. --Prairieplant (talk) 21:57, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

I have a subscription the New York Times and get all of those - I've been slowly working my way through their archives. I'm not able to see the LA Times or Publishers Weekly. I am, however, finding quite a bit of scholarly literature, so I think I'll spend my time running that down. A well known American lit. critic has written an essay collected in a book that I might buy. Also, G is for Grafton is a trove of information. So, at the moment I'm reading. Plus I'd like to re-read the series. As you say, enough for now :) Victoriaearle (tk) 22:04, 16 January 2018 (UTC)