Talk:Murder in Mesopotamia/Archive 1

Archive 1

Plot summary is still too long

GUtt01 Your removal of the flag is not justified. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murder_in_Mesopotamia&diff=793234765&oldid=793234491 I do not want an edit war, but the revision is not better than what was there and is still too long. Plots for Agatha Christie stories can be shorter by removing details, like your describing the area as a former protectorate of England, which is irrelevant to the plot line, as one example. It will be shorter if you quit adding to it, as well. --Prairieplant (talk) 14:00, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

The changes at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murder_in_Mesopotamia&diff=793254681&oldid=793234866 and following have brought the word count to an acceptable level, and the plot summary reads better. The flag for a too-long summary is no longer needed. --Prairieplant (talk) 05:29, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Errors added to References

Tajotep When you made this change https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Murder_in_Mesopotamia&diff=prev&oldid=813674274, the cite format is used, but many errors were generated in the Reference list because one essential parameter was forgotten. The format needs a title= for each citation. A few of those old reviews include an author's name in the text, which could be placed in the citation, too. Maybe you could use the title=Review of Murder in Mesopotamia or simple title=Review if you cannot find the actual title from the newspaper that day. It pays to look at the page after doing an edit, a lesson I have learned slowly. ---Prairieplant (talk) 05:35, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Prairieplant Yesterday I was looking for the news, but I didn't find anything. I've just added "title=Review of Murder in Mesopotamia" (it can be reiterative, but it's the best way to check the problem of the value). Thanks for your revision. Tajotep (talk) 22:51, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

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Both archived links lead to the correct page. --Prairieplant (talk) 00:16, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Accuracy

A word to the wise: before adding an edit summary like "The text is a quotation, please refrain from editing what was written in 1936", as you did earlier today, it is as well to check your facts. Whoever posted the Observer quotation was the one who edited what was written in 1936. I have once again restored the ipsissima verba. I can send you a pdf of the original if you don't believe me. Best wishes, Tim riley talk 08:43, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Tim riley, I trust that a quote from a paper copy of a newspaper, in place long before I first read or edited this article, is correct. I looked for an online copy, did not find it, as it is always nice to post a url to the source. The chunk of text is wholly enclosed in quote marks. Rather than be a tad snarky to me, you might have posted first to this Talk page with your link to the newspaper page to indicate the quote was inaccurate. Quotes from old newspapers in England have not been so available to me.

Further, many Wikipedia editors have told me that such large blocks of quotation are not preferred in the Reviews section, no matter how well-written by the reviewer. Shorter phrases from the source mixed with text written by the editor is preferred, but not what was done by the editors who worked so hard to get contemporary reviews for so many novels by Agatha Christie. I did not learn that lesson until after I hunted for reviews of many novels. Now I do what I can to match the currently preferred style. Please do post the link to the pdf of the page in the newspaper. - -Prairieplant (talk) 09:25, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Can't be done, I'm afraid, or naturally I'd have done it. I access the press archives via a local library link that will not work for anyone who is not a member. My much-missed colleague, the late Brian Boulton, disagreed with me on this, but I think showing such links is so unhelpful and exasperating to the generality of WP readers as to be a net liability. Similarly, I disagree with another regular colleague, happily still with us, about linking to Google books when no text is accessible and only bibliographical details are available, which also seems to me likely to irritate the reader who follows the link expecting to be able to read the cited source. The word "snarky" was new to me, but I see from the OED it means "irritable, short-tempered (colloquial)". I was certainly not those when I posted the above comment, which was intended to be useful and to help you refrain from accusing other editors of falsification in future. Tim riley talk 11:46, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Apology accepted. You did seem snarky (which means snide and a bit condescending to me) as there was no explanation, no facts, as to why you were changing the quote, only that you were changing the quote. Thus I wrote an edit description that was clear as to why I reverted. Can this article be seen from newspapers.com? I think those links are okay to use, as some people pay for the subscription. I have used sources available via my library for Wikipedia articles, using EBSCO. If one library offers it, other libraries may offer it as well, as long as it is a full citation, with title of the article or section (department), author, date and name of newspaper. Page number helps too. I would put the url, and use those new url- codes to indicate that access requires a subscription in the formatted reference. I think newspapers.com will show a bit to the non-subscriber. In this case, it will indicate the basis for changing the quotation. I still do not know what ipsissima verba means, but I am not looking it up. A google book entry even with no text visible does provide the ISBN and publisher for a book, which I find quite useful, especially when someone gives a page number in a book, and neglects to indicate the edition of the book, as page numbers will change with the edition. I have to hope the edition I found matches their page number. --Prairieplant (talk) 02:04, 21 October 2020 (UTC)