Talk:Brown & Sharpe

On the idea of quoting whole passages from Roe 1916 (PD-US)

[Moved from user talk page]

I need help with the Brown & Sharpe page. It is a mess. I saw that you had contributed to it so please help.Toonami Reactor (talk) 19:29, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Hi. The article isn't a mess; it just relies too much on quoting from one source. The editorial brackets that you removed indicate places where an extensive direct quote (from Roe 1916) has been augmented with additional info. I reverted those changes, because the purpose of editorial brackets is to show the reader what is part of the original quote and what has been added editorially. When an ellipsis is in brackets, that tells the reader that part of the quote has been elided. Showing these editorial changes in brackets avoids putting words in the mouth of the quoted source.

The only problem with the article as currently composed is that the historical info is all directly quoted from a (public-domain) seminal classic of machine tool history (Roe 1916), rather than being an original synthesis from multiple sources. I agree that this is not the ideal form for an encyclopedia article. It really would be better to just remove the extensive quoting from Roe 1916 and just let the reader click through and read the original for himself/herself. One can read the whole thing for free on one's PC thanks to the magic of Google Book Search and the fact that the book is PD-US (pre-1923). So I think that we should just prune the article back and let the reader click through to the source. I will do that this week pending time to work on it. — ¾-10 21:15, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Update: Done. — ¾-10 14:15, 17 October 2008 (UTC)