Talk:Florence Violet McKenzie/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Grandiose (talk · contribs) 10:56, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

I'll be conducting a full review soon, but the article mostly looks fine. I think the references need a few small tweaks - hampered a little by unclear GA guidelines - but perhaps we can overlook the exact technicalities of necessary improvements. In the meantime, can you look at #16 and #17? The former needs a title and author (her?), the latter title (if there is one) and the correction of "pp" to "p" since only one page is mentioned. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 10:56, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi Grandiose - thanks for looking at this GA Review so quickly after I listed it. It's my first nomination so I'm hoping it will work smootly :-)

Regarding citation 16: I've added in a quotation and clarified that the citation is directly from Mrs. McKenzie. Unfortunately I don't have a page number or article title. I'm assuming it's the 'letter from the editor' page but I cannot be sure.

Regarding citation 17: the "Ex-WRANS ditty box" reference - I've fixed the pp. It appears to be a low-circulation "friends" magazine, not "published with an ISBN etc. There is a collection in the National Library of Australia[1] but it is not ditigised and very unlikely to be in any other libraries. I've not sighted the reference myself but am relying on the Dictionary of Sydney's own fact checking[2]. If they knew more, they would have published more. Wittylama 11:32, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Image review: generally good, but I'm a little worried about the c.1953 photograph. Would this be in copyright if it turned out to be 1955, say? Others are fine. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 20:54, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Checking the source where I got the image (from the Dictionary of Sydney here[3]) you can see that it is assumed to be 1953 with a range of 5 years either side applied to the metadata, so it appears in a wider range of search possibilities [I used to work for the Dictionary of Sydney as multimedia officer, so I know how their image attribution system works]. They've done their own checking on the image and that's the best guess date, even asking the original owners (the Ex-Wrans Association NSW). The thing with this particular case is that the 10 year window falls on the 1955 barrier. All I can say is 1953 is their best guess, and that, given the subjects of the photo are visiting navy personnel, the earlier dates are more likely because it is closer to the dates of the war. Wittylama 11:32, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm wondering about ref #7 - is this from a book? Is there anything more to it? Same with #10. Publisher? Author? Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 14:21, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

I've added National Library catalogue references to both of these now. The first (#7) doesn't really have anything more to say about it - it's the university calendar publication with all of the dates of exams, holidays etc. These days they're online and much more succinct but back then I gather that it included details of who passed each course/graduated. The second (#10) is the "Sand's Directory" - which I've now added into the article as well (currently a redlink). Sands was a publisher of business registries - like today's Yellow Pages - and is a super useful resource for urban historians. They're online, but behind a paywall.example.

Hope that helps, Wittylama 22:33, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

I note there are now three "citation needed" tags for the sentences:

• "The Wireless Weekly" eventually became Electronics Australia, and remained in circulation until 2001.[citation needed]"
• "In 1979 she was made a Member of the Royal Naval Amateur Radio Society.[citation needed]"
• "The Church has since relocated to 320 Sussex St, where the plaque can be seen in the garden.[citation needed]"

For the first one of these, the article Electronics Australia already has the (unfootnoted) statement that "Electronics Australia survived into the 2000s." It's difficult to prove a negative because their own website (linked from the Internet Archive at the bottom of the article) doesn't say "we're going to close this year" or words to that effect. I could provide the reference to the National Library of Australia catalogue to demonstrate that all catalogue entries for periodicals titled "electronics australia" cease in early 2000s[4] but I think that's not a very good source.

For the other two, and indeed for the first one as well, it is possible that with some in-person research a footnote could be found in a non-digitsed archive (e.g. by taking a photo of the plaque). However, do you think it is acceptable to cite the Dictionary of Sydney itself in these cases? Because this article came 99% from the DoS as a freely-licensed text, it could be argued that it is a circular reference. However, the DoS is a third party Reliable Source that I belive should be able to be referenced in its own right, even if that means we're footnoting "their" text to themselves. What do you think of this approach for each of these citation needed tags? Wittylama 21:52, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Not the best answer, but may be suitable if others can't be found. '"The Wireless Weekly" eventually became Electronics Australia' can be referenced separately, perhaps this.

However, I'm now worried that we're just taking the Dictionary of Sydney's references straight off - is this correct? WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT is part of WP:CITE and so this will need special attention, perhaps WT:GAN or WP:VPP or so. Not sure. Bit of a special case. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 22:06, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

I've added a separate reference to the fact of the magazine changing titles (to one of the sources already used elsewhere) as suggested. I've found this which clearly states that "electronics australia" was cancelled in 2001 but I wouldn't consider it a Reliable Source for WP's purposes, even though I have no reason to doubt it.

You're right that it is a bit of a special case given that the DoS text is both encyclopedic and freely-licensed (like the 1911 britannica for example), but also meeting our standards of Reliable Source because each article has a named expert author who stands by their claim and provides their own primary-source footnotes too. Our mutual concern is not because the original source is unreliable but because it is also the basis of the content in WP. Whilst I certainly understand that this issue is worth pondering, my opinion is that there would be no controversy if we were talking about using DoS as a footnote for these facts in any other article and therefore we should accept DoS footnotes here too. Wittylama 23:24, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

I would have thought that SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT was drafted on the basis that we trusted the "initial" source (for example, a book; in this instance, the Dictionary of Sydney). I think that references we've lifted directly, which is most of them, that we haven't verified, should be marked as such per that policy. Perhaps "Cited in Dictionary of Sydney" - something short, at least. Then the remaining needed citations can be to the Dictionary of Sydney as well. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 08:51, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a ver good solution to me :-) I've gone and cited DoS for the three remaining 'citation needed' tags and improved the reference to increase the level of detail(diff). Can you show me an example of how that would look in one of the references so I can copy it to the rest? It would be very hard for me to get access to some of the primary sources (e.g. the oral history recording in her high-school's archive) and nigh-impossible for any reader to do so) so to mark it as "oral history recording, xyz archive, cited in DoS" would be a fair way of providing the Verifiability. If every single footnote were treated that way it would become a problem of Notability but there's sufficient independent and checkable sources cited for this to not be a problem. Wittylama 21:33, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

"Dictionary of Sydney citing..." is probably sufficient. (If not, WikiEd's find and replace feature coudl prove useful.) I don't have any notability concerns. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 21:54, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

I've gone through and added "Cited by Dictionary of Sydney" to the end of all of the references that are otherwise effectively uncheckable e.g. the oral history, the closed newspapers/newsletters that are not digitised (of which there are a lot), and the archived personal correspondences.(diff) I've put this at the end of the ref rather than your suggestion of at the beginning as I think it's equally clear about SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT whilst allowing the reader to get the most important citation info first. What do you think? I've also found a new pic (of the flag semaphore) which is nice! Wittylama 13:15, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

In fact the only reference should be the Dictionary of Sydney - this is the solution to the problem, since all the references are actually copied from the reference section of that article. No wikipedia editor is claiming to have done this research themselves. DoS is a respectable source and should be sufficient. All the other little references should therefore be deleted and if anyone wants to follow the source trail they can start by looking at DoS. 203.214.99.197 (talk) 05:56, 8 December 2018 (UTC)