User talk:Mikeblas/Archives/2023/November

Thank you

Thank you for cleaning up reference errors on Chalmers Automobile. I will be more mindful of that in the future. Apologies. Varnent (talk)^(COI) 19:21, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

No worrries -- it happens all over the encyclopedia. It looks like someone removed the URLs, then flattened those to be the same (with different anchor names), then they got kind of conflated, then you tried to de-duplicate them. I went back several months to find an edit by RandomCanadian which was the root of the problem. Now, these have full citations and everything fits together ... but I'm not sure why links to the PDFs can't be used. -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:30, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

As is so often the case here - every solution uncovers a new set of mysteries in need of resolution. Thank you for all of your efforts and diligence! Varnent (talk)^(COI) 20:09, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

David White (Scottish footballer)

You reverted an edit on this page saying it was unsourced - but the sources were in the edit summary. GiantSnowman 19:00, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

The <ref name=“independent”/> source was incorrect (with curly quotes) and doesn't bind to the unnamed bare URL in the edit summary. That edit caused a referencing error and added the page to Category:Pages with broken reference names, so I reverted it. -- Mikeblas (talk) Mikeblas (talk) 20:56, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Scott Mayer (racing driver)

Hi, just wanted to make known that the aforementioned table you did delete in the last edit was, in fact, incorrectly added by mistake. My issue with the first edit was the outright deletion of the Indy Pro Series results chart as well, but I failed to notice the other table.

Therefore, I do apologize for it and for using meaner language than the situation warranted on this particular forum. I publicly thanked your edit to further reinforce this point, although I do still think that the results table could have been flagged. MasterAlSpain 18:19, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. I don't think your comment was at all appropriate, and regret mimicking it. But I'm glad you've found your error and cleaned up the table. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:47, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Canadian election template references

Hi Mikeblas, hope you're doing well. I saw the discussion with the creator of the templates about the lack of references and agree that they do need references as these templates are on a lot of different pages. My concern is how to provide sources that meet all of the requirements for a high quality source while being something that can be widely applied to the templates; right now it is very inconsistent which templates are and aren't tagged as unreferenced. Since you have experience in fixing references, do you have any suggestions on what would be a good reference (the Election Canada website is not my favourite) and how to include it into a template that doesn't look clunky or break the table? Thanks! Kazamzam (talk) 19:53, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I think the Wikipedia:Reliable sources page gives great advice about what make a good reference. I visit Canada often, but I don't know much about its history ... and certainly don't know where I'd look for historical information about its various elections so I can't help much more for sources.

Meanwhile, not everything on Wikipedia can be edited all at once, so I'm sure there are many templates that should be marked as unreferenced but aren't yet marked. Even thinking of only the Canadian election templates, there are hundreds -- if not more than 1000 -- and reviewing so many takes time. -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:03, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm familiar with how to find a source and as a Canadian I'm familiar with the historical information about elections. I'm asking if you could help because you have been drive-by tagging these templates which makes any article using the template show up as unreferenced, so I was hoping you would be up for finding these sources rather than adding a tag and moving on. Just tagging it as unreferenced doesn't really help with anything as it's very obvious what the issue is (lack of references). The goal is to improve the article, not to tag it for the sake of it being tagged. Kazamzam (talk) 20:55, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Tagging the template as unreferenced explicitly informs readers that the data can't be verified, and therefore isn't trustworthy. Without the tag, the lack of verifiability in the article is not apparent in the articles transcluding the information. I've asked a couple of the authors for help, but they haven't taken action after some time. Per WP:BURDEN, the editor adding the material should be providing verifiable sources. It might be easier to remove the templates; many of them are transcluded only once anyway, and it seems like almost all of them are not referenced. If we assume these authors did use some source, then they should be readily able to provide it. If they haven't, and no source is discoverable, then either the tag should remain to indicate the lack of verifiability, or the material should be deleted (again per WP:BURDEN). -- Mikeblas (talk) 23:09, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Also, I guess the problem with "klunky" is built-in to the election results templates. "Klunky" is subjective, but I don't think it's a problem to add a footnote with {{CANelec/source}}. The templates could provide reference parameters for each of their columns, too. A votes_note parameter, for example, could add the provided reference to the header for the emitted "votes" column".

Maybe it's possible, if a formulaic source exists, to have the templates generate a reference. Lots of templates do this: given a region and a year, they can programatically generate a link to a reliable source.

As for your concern about drive-by tagging, it seems like the reason for the tag is very apparent: there are no references, at all. If you'd like me to add a |reason= parameter, or a discussion on the talk pages, I can do so -- but I don't think it would say more than "I added this tag because the information in the template was unreferenced. Should it be deleted instead?"

I see that you tried to add a reference to {{2017 Canadian federal by-elections/Ottawa—Vanier}}. When I tried to verify that reference, I couldn't find anything that the template included: vote counts, percent of turnout, percent change since last election, rejected ballots, or even the names and parties of the candidates. (What is "expense limit"? Seemed to be some expense information at your reference, but ...) How would a reader use the reference you gave to verify the information on the template? -- Mikeblas (talk) 23:37, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Can you please ping or @ me if you're going to respond to these messages? Secondly, if you looked through the reference I provided, you would see that it confirms that the winner of the election was Mona Fortier from the Liberal Party.

I agree that the editor providing the information has the first responsibility to provide sources, however, per WP:CLEANUPTAG, you as the 'tagger' have a similar if lesser responsibility: don't tag an article if you can easily and confidently fix the problem; do some research to attempt to solve the problem before tagging. You have tagged hundreds of templates as unreferenced and added references to, as far as I can tell, none of them. Historical data from the 1874 election might be hard to find - 1980 is pretty recent in terms of election record maintenance. If you don't like the reference I have added, you are welcome to find more (to be honest, that site isn't my favourite but Elections Canada Database is pretty good) and I'm happy to help. While I agree that the lack of citations is problematic, I'm frustrated by this because it has added hundreds of articles that have citations to the unreferenced articles category; providing sources for them is extremely time-consuming when there are other articles that have been in the backlog since 2007. All I am asking is that you be considerate of this, and the WP:CLEANUPTAG guidelines, going forward. Best, Kazamzam (talk) 04:49, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

@Kazamzam: When you respond to me, you don't ping or at; why do you ask that I do so for you? (I mean this genuinely: I thought that responses on talk pages were always pinged. Are they only pinged in one direction, sometimes? Which direction? When?)

I did look through the reference you provided. As I described, it was unable to support the vote count, turnout percentage, rejected ballots information, and the parties of the candidates. Indeed, one bulleted sentence fragment in the 5000 word article does mention that Fortier won the election. But the reference wasn't placed at Fortier's name and instead placed at the bottom of the box, implying that it more widely supported the entire template. The vote counts and percentages and the participation of the other candidates is still completely un-verifiable in that template. References are meant to be "easily verifiable", so expecting that someone who wanted to verify this template review such a large document to come back with only one small fact doesn't seem to qualify that reference as particularly useful.

Indeed, tagging articles *does* take the first step toward improving articles -- it requests help. It also lets any reader of the article know that facts presented in the article are not (and can not be) verified. I can't easily or confidently fix the problem. I've contacted the authors of these templates and had no response. I've dug around for references for each of the years that I've tagged but not come up with anything that contains vote counts or percentages. As such, I don't see any problem with my tags. Have you written to the authors who placed those facts, asking after their sources, per WP:BURDEN?

The articles using these templates are without citations, so they have no reason not to be in an uncited article category. It's true that other referencing problems exist, but the categories collect all referencing problems and don't discriminate on age or attempt to provide any triage or prioritization. That other propblems exist is no reason not to call attention to any other problem, really. Indeed, providing sources is time-consuming. But that's not a reason to call out articles (or templates) that are completely lacking sources, and isn't a reason to not pursue a fix. In this case, I think the authors of the original templates (and the CanadaElection templates they invoke) either were short-sighted in designing templates that were easy to reference, or were not prepared to do any referencing and really dropped the ball.

I don't think I'm in violation of any guidelines -- least of all WP:V or WP:BURDEN -- and will continue tagging unreferenced templates as I see fit. If you'd rather, I can propose the deletion of these unreferenced templates and that will both remove unverifiable material (my primary concern) and relieve the referencing workload (which seems to be your driving concern). I'm surprised that I need to make such a strong case for this information to be referenced. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:13, 30 November 2023 (UTC)