Talk:Charles H. Black/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Ganesha811 (talk · contribs) 15:50, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi! I see the recent kerfuffle that involved your GA nominations. I am willing to review this one (and the other 5 you currently have nominated), but it would be good to get an indication from you that you are still editing and willing to respond to comments and concerns on this review. Please let me know by the end of next week (10/7) if you are around/available. Thank you. —Ganesha811 (talk) 15:50, 27 September 2022 (UTC)


 * With the exception of (probably) Scharchburg and (possibly) Bodenhamer, none of the sources used in the article are reliable, and some of them have been misused even if we take them as reliable. For example, the statement Black also paid the first damages for an automobile accident is cited to a local-history website . Such sites are rarely fully reliable, and certainly can't be relied on for statements such as "The first X happened here in our town/our state!" -- a fact recognized by that particular source itself, as seen in fact that what it actually says is "Black probably also paid the first damage claim for an automobile accident". Doug Coldwell has simply ignored the "probably" and turned it into a statement of flat fact that Black was first.Same goes for "first driver's license" -- the source (which, I repeat, isn't reliable for such a statement anyway) says "possibly first", but the article says, flatly, "first".Third example: Artice says One day he also drove political boss Thomas Taggart to his residence on Delaware Street from the old Indianapolis Grand Hotel; source says Black also claimed taking Thomas Taggart home from the Grand Hotel one day. Once again conjecture/claim is turned into certainty. It's intolerable.Words fail. Those are the first three "facts" I checked, and all three of them don't verify. I'm sorry, but this is just one more DC mess that needs an application of WP:TNT. In the meantime, it's a GA quick-fail for the obvious abuse of sources if nothing else. EEng 20:43, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I double-checked your work, and you are correct. This one will not meet the GA criteria without a ton of work, and is a quickfail under the first provision. Doug, if you return, feel free to renominate it, but first address these and any other issues. —Ganesha811 (talk) 21:48, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
 * To be clear, the article can't be more than a stub unless modern, comprehensive sources are found for most of its claims. What sinks so many of DC's articles is that he bases them almost entirely on old newspaper articles. A 1920 newspaper isn't reliable for who invented the first alcohol-powered horseless carriage (or whatever) in 1890. That requires modern sources in a position to have researched such stuff -- e.g. an SAE source. And even among modern sources, titles such as "famous firsts", covering all kinds of topic areas, are tertiary sources which are rarely reliable either. EEng 22:01, 27 September 2022 (UTC)