Talk:Star Wars: The Vintage Collection

Notability

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I stumbled across this article a year ago while searching for typos, and added a {{notability}} tag. But if the only source is a blog, and no reliable sources cover the range, then what is this doing in the encyclopedia? "To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources" -- John of Reading (talk) 15:01, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Reversion of unsourced additions since October 2019

Nobody here is going to like this, but I feel this is appropriate, if long (long) overdue.

Despite the blast of links left unsigned on my talk page, the bulk of the additions since October 2019 have been 100% completely and totally unsourced. This despite the fact that the article was tagged as needing more citations since 2012. The sole reference citation on the page is to a starwars.com blog post from 2017; since then, not a single reliable source has been added. This flies in the face of Wikipedia's verifiability policy.

I feel the best thing to do is to revert all of the additions since October 2019, in the hopes that User:DarthBrett78, who made the vast majority of the content since then and who has contributed almost half of the entire article and who, thankfully, is still actively editing, will work with other editors to (re-)add individual details to the article with appropriately cited reliable sources. Ideally, the content left behind after my massive deletion will also get properly sourced, so the tag at the top of the article can be removed, but that might be too much to ask at this point. And remember, the tag includes links which may be useful in finding good sources; they then have to be added to the article in the appropriate places.

I'm sorry if this seems too aggressive an approach, but my experience on Wikipedia tells me that without a clean, fresh start, this page will never meet WP policy requirements and it will take more work to deal with it if we just let things go as they have for so many years. Thanks for understanding. I'm watching the article so I can sometimes help with citation formatting, but I'm surely not informed enough about good sources for these toys. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 17:46, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

What's a "wave"?

This article has tables where the left-most column is "Wave", as if it's the most important thing about these items. But what is that? It is not explained in the introduction where I'd expect it. Can somebody add that please? I guess "Number" is a model number for the individual toy; if not, can you add that, too? Thanks, — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 18:00, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

A "wave" is the term used for action figures to designate the case they were released in. Think of it as a series in trading cards, or a collection, same thing but the specific word "wave" is used instead for toys. So "Wave 1" would be the same as "Series 1" and so forth. It is explained, well briefly, before the list of figures released. And yes, "Number" is indeed the designated number the figure is given by the manufacturer themselves and is printed on the card and packaging just like a baseball trading card is given a unique and specific number for a specific player. So that is why 'Wave' is the first column. If you were looking at a list of episodes for a TV series, you can think of a "wave" as being the season and the "Number" being the episode#. Hope that clarifies things.

I also want to vent some frustrations on this matter because a ton of info is being erased here and is making the article much less accurate and not nearly as thorough or up-to-date as it should be. Which in-turn, is not providing the information someone may want to find on here when reading about the specific subject. But maybe that is an issue with Wikipedia itself? I don't think I'm going to bother trying to help with this article anymore at this point though, as I feel like the time and effort that was put into updating and making additions to it is being disregarded. Maybe it was information that isn't deemed useful to those not interested in the subject matter, but then that shouldn't necessarily be a reason to delete or remove information, either. DarthBrett78 (talk) 00:46, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your explanation and cordial response. Please let me offer a clarification about the "info being erased" bit in the second half of your reply (which I would have preferred to discuss in the section above, but here we are).

We cannot be making the article less accurate, as you say, when we remove unsourced content. If it's not sourced, it is of minimal value. How does any reader know whether it's accurate? They check the references, but, here, there aren't any. So it's no worse having less unreliable content than having a lot of unreliable content. It's actually better, even.

I absolutely do not want to chase you away. You obviously have expertise and sources for at least some of the information you've generously added in the last year-and-a-half, which means you are probably the best person on the planet to re-add the info (possibly bit-by-bit), just referencing the sources you know about. You added a bunch of URLs to my talk page; the thing is to use those to back up the various bits of data as you readd them.

And as I'm sure you know, the info I removed isn't really gone; it's visible in the page history and can often be copied-pasted back into the live article, for each bit you have a source for.

I do not mean to disregard your time and effort; in fact, I feel kind of awful. I also do not consider this info as not deemed useful; it's quite an appropriate page for Wikipedia, IMHO. But only if it has some sources supporting it. That's all I'm trying to push for. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 14:07, 11 May 2021 (UTC)