KryptonKnowledge

September 2018

Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but you recently removed maintenance templates from USS Virgo (AKA-20). When removing maintenance templates, please be sure to either resolve the problem that the template refers to, or give a valid reason for the removal in the edit summary. Please see Help:Maintenance template removal for further information on when maintenance templates should or should not be removed. If this was a mistake, don't worry, as your removal of this template has been reverted. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia, and if you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Dl2000 (talk) 14:15, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Response

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:KryptonKnowledge#September_2018

I put the following comment in the Reference section of the page ... I posted updates and missing / requested information about the USS Virgo ship, accomplishments and crew - that was deleted. My references were the ship's Association web site and other first person interviews with members of the Association.

The USS Virgo Association is a members group representing officers and crew of the USS Virgo from 1943 to 1971. Every member of the Association served on the ship. Half of the members have since passed away. The group created a commercial .COM website early on in WWW history to capture their collective experiences. This information was re-validated by first-person interviews on video recording between 2010-2014 in preparation for a documentary film about the ship.

I left the following perplexity out of the Wiki reference section... While the Association is still in existence, it is no longer financially viable to keep the website running. Fortunately the site was captured in the Way Back Machine. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20131216204307/http://www.uss-virgo.com/history.htm )

Losing this valuable information seems a terrible shame. Wikipedia could at least keep this information and note the source for what it is - self-edited and self-published by eye-witnesses to history. Future generations deserve to know these details of seemingly insignificant information. I have read through all the Wiki policy statements on third-party sources and none seem to be violated by my posting of the Association material for the benefit of future generations. Certainly none of it is controversial and all persons referenced have passed away.

Have you reviewed Wikipedia's policies on reliable sources? While the USS Virgo Association has no doubt done much good work in documenting its history, its reliability as a source would need to be established. The USS Virgo Association materials might be considered a self-published source, which causes some policy/sourcing concerns. It may be better to support this with other publications and news articles that meet WP:RS e.g. established military publications. If you wish to retain this information online, Wikipedia is not intended to function as a webhost for that, therefore you will need to find another place to host that information, or hope that archive.org will retain that material indefinitely. Even if such history is included in Wikipedia, anyone could edit this, sometimes as vandalism. You could look at External Links guidelines to determine if a link to the archive.org material is feasible. Dl2000 (talk) 03:01, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

September 2018

Please do not add or change content, as you did at USS Virgo (AKA-20), without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you.--- Barek (talk • contribs) - 17:17, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

A summary of some important site policies and guidelines you seem to have missed

• "Truth" is not the only criteria for inclusion, verifiability is also required.
• Always cite a source for any new information. When adding this information to articles, use <ref>reference tags like this</ref>, containing the name of the source, the author, page number, publisher or web address (if applicable).
• We do not publish original thought nor original research.
• Primary sources are usually avoided to prevent original research. Secondary or tertiary sources are preferred for this reason as well.
• Reliable sources typically include: articles from mainstream magazines or newspapers (particularly scholarly journals), or books by recognized authors (basically, books by respected publishers). Online versions of these are usually accepted, provided they're held to the same standards. User generated sources (like Wikipedia) are to be avoided. Self-published sources should be avoided except for information by and about the subject that is not self-serving (for example, citing a company's website to establish something like year of establishment).
• Wikipedia is not a source for Wikipedia. This is intentional.
• Articles are to be written from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia is not concerned with facts or opinions, it just summarizes reliable sources. Real scholarship actually does not say what understanding of the world is "true," but only with what there is evidence for.

In short, you have to cite a published source so other people know you're not just making stuff up. Don't get pissy about it, it's a standard that everyone is held to. Citing published sources is just the responsible thing to do. It's a skill that's required to get a degree from any legitimate university. Ian.thomson (talk) 03:48, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Looks like I should've added:

• Wikipedia does not tolerate copyright violations or plagiarism. Paraphrase sources, do not steal text from them.
• Minor edits are those that add or remove little content, and mainly consists of undoing undeniable vandalism or fixing grammar, spelling, or formatting errors.

Ian.thomson (talk) 05:44, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Your last attempt to edit USS Virgo (AKA-20) had the following problems:

• You failed to attribute the text as per WP:FREECOPYING.
• You didn't really seem to pay attention to where you were putting the text. The intro summarizes the body of the article.

I moved the material to its own section, gave it proper attribution, changed the close paraphrasing (which is not proper paraphrasing) to a blockquote. Other editors may still decide the material requires additional sources to establish its noteworthiness.

You might be thinking "Well, you fixed it, thanks for doing that instead of deleting it!" -- but there's still the issue that you left a mess for another editor to clean up. Most of the time, the easiest way to clean up such a mess is to just revert the edit (and much of the time, that's the only way). You don't have to learn this stuff before even signing up or even over night but you do need to show that you are trying to learn.

I want you to understand that anyone who is here for an extended period is here because they want the project to do well. Wikipedia avoids formal hierarchies and we avoid relying on editor knowledge for article content -- but that doesn't change the fact that some editors have more experience the site's workings than other users. Ian.thomson (talk) 06:30, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Finding sources

Hi KryptonKnowledge, I saw your request for help with citations. I can offer you some strategy for finding them.

• Use Google Books to look for potential sources. There will be some that let you see the whole text, some that allow you to see partial text, some show only snippets and some have nothing more than the listing. Do not use those that show Wikipedia as the source as we don't allow that. If you find something that you want to add to the article then you will need to review our pages on citations and some examples to get you started.
• If you find books that you can't see, record the info. You may be able to get assistance finding them from your local library system; if they don't have it, they may be able to get it on an interlibrary loan. You should be able to search their catalog from home before making a trip to your local branch. Your librarian may help you locate other resources.
• We have two different WikiProjects where other members may be of some assistance. WikiProject Military history and WikiProject Ships and you can request help in finding sources on their respective talk pages, here and here. Make sure to link to the article and mention that you placed some requests on the talk page. The members on those projects may already be familiar with specialized resources.
• WikiProject Resource Exchange is specifically for finding sources.

Hopefully this helps. Oh, I fixed the talk page. We place newer posts below the previous ones.
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 03:54, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

You also may find ProveIt to be helpful. It is a tool to help with reference formatting.
 — Berean Hunter (talk) 12:58, 5 September 2018 (UTC)

Cool - thanks - I will investigate those. KryptonKnowledge (talk) 20:42, 5 September 2018 (UTC)