Talk:Noel Preston

Explaining edit

What I've tried to do is to bring a little more order into this article. For instance, I've tried to put aspects of Preston's career in some chronological order, although I/vee tried not to change the content as such. I do acknowledge that the article is still in need of reliable sources for much of this content. Feel free to revert if you think my edit was not helpful. HistoryEditor3 (talk) 07:32, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm just wondering whether the problem with this article is that it tries to give too much detail. There's no doubt that Preston was a significant figure in Queensland history, and especially in the efforts to reform and modernize Queensland, but perhaps some of the detail could be deleted. This would solve the problem of not having sufficient citations. I'd be interested in what other editors think. HistoryEditor3 (talk) 21:01, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

I would not say I had an interest in the article; I have no memory of even editing it, but looking at the article and talk page histories, it seems that when I was doing Queensland-project tagging some months ago, and I came up on this article as being about a Queensland topic but not tagged as such. It seems I must have noticed that it was not well-sourced and had a lot of external links and tried to tidy it up a little. I think the problem with this article started with its creation in 2007 which is uncited but had a number of external links. I also note that it was created by User:Kim Preston (noting that the article mentions Kim as a child of Noel Preston), so the user may have conflict of interest with the article topic and the user talk page suggests I am not the first person to suspect this. As you will see on that talk page, there was also a concern that the material was a copyright violation from a webpage which no longer exists but which can still be see in the Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070829025307/http://noelpreston.id.au/bio_contact.html and would appear to be a webpage created by or for Noel Preston, so not an independent source . So, it's fair to say that this article is mired in policy violations in terms of its history here on Wikipedia, which is not unusual in articles created by new contributors (User:Kim Preston only contributed to this article). Having said all of that, clearly Noel Preston was a real person who did make contributions which I believe would meet Wikipedia's theshold for notability. In particular, his death in 2020 resulted in a number of organisations and mainstream media writing about him (see this Google search), so I think there is plenty of source material there if you want to improve the article. I feel there will be plenty to write about from that material, so if there is some existing content that you can't adequately cite, just delete it. As you suggest yourself, every little detail does not need to be here, just what you can reliably cite. So please go ahead and improve the article. One thing that would be a nice inclusion in the article is a photo, but most photos of him are likely to be from 1955 onwards and hence in copyright. Kerry (talk) 01:24, 28 September 2024 (UTC)