GutmKate
Welcome
editHello, GutmKate, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.
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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:27, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
Crime related articles
editHi! I wanted to leave some feedback along with what your professor wrote. Crime related articles can be fairly difficult to write, not because there aren't things to say but rather that you have to show where the crime has received enough coverage to justify inclusion. WP:PERPETRATOR has some information about this - the gist is mainly that the criminal has to have received a lot of coverage in independent, reliable sources over a decent stretch of time. Many crimes will receive local coverage, so local coverage can often be depreciated with it comes to articles - especially crimes since many areas are more likely to cover local events. In the case of crimes from several years ago, in many cases the best sourcing will be academic texts and journals that discuss the case. Given the nature of this crime, it's fairly likely that there will be enough coverage of this type to justify inclusion but it's not always a guarantee. Avoid the "murderpedias" and other sites like that when it comes to things to use as a source itself, as those are usually self-published. You can use them as sort of a jumping off point since many of them will list the news articles and coverage that a crime or criminal has received, but these sites by themselves aren't considered reliable sources on here.
I did do a quick search for sourcing just now and found this mention in a book by ABC-CLIO, which is a trusted academic publisher. I also found book, which was published through Penguin, which is an OK source even though Penguin doesn't hold the same weight as an academic publisher. Be very careful when looking at books, however, as not all publishers are considered to be reliable and some search engines and databases will include content released through self-publishing companies like Lulu. (Books released through them are almost always considered to be unreliable.) As your professor stated, it's very important that you set up a meeting with a research librarian at your school to help find sources. The reason for this is that while I can help you find some things via the Internet and the databases I have access to (I received a MLIS and have had some research librarian training), I can't guarantee that you will have access to them via your local libraries and there's always something to be said for in person and local interactions.
One of the number one things is to make sure that you don't limit your research to the first few pages of Google - make sure that you do a database search and that you use different variations of Riva's name, like "James Riva" and "James P. Riva". Something I've found is that if you use limiters (ie, quotation marks) on Google and database searches, you can sometimes receive more specific results. Also, when pulling news sources, make sure to look for who wrote it - some papers use content produced by the Associated Press so you may find several newspapers that have the same article but with a slightly reworded title.
I hope this helps! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:55, 12 June 2017 (UTC)