Talk:KCKN (defunct)

Start
I have started this page/story to document one of the USA's oldest radio stations and to document its significance(as has already been done with WHB and other KC stations)to both Kansas City and the development of the commercial radio industry in the early part of the 20th century.

Sources used to this point: "Kansas Room" Kansas City, Kansas Public Library; Broadcast Yearbook, an industry trade publication; KCK Library microfilm copies of the Kansas City Kansan newspaper.

Jack Lester (talk) 02:26, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Jack Lester, thanks for working so hard on this project. I hope you will pause for a moment, however, to clean up what you have done so far, before going on to write an extensive article with deficiencies.

Here's the problem: As you rough in your content, you are noting some of your sources. Unfortunately, your references are of the form, 'Trade Publication, "Broadcasting Yearbook"', 'Microfilms/KCKansan newspaper', or 'Microfilm of the Kansas City Star, Kansas City, Kansas (66101) Public Library'. These are (to put it mildly) incomplete citations. They are, in fact, entirely unusable as a basis for a Wikipedia article.

What's needed are specific publication names, authors, page numbers, etc. Please read through the information at Citing sources, one of the most important pages in Wikipedia. I hope it will help you to see what needs to be indone on the KCKN article page. I'm hoping you still know where you got the information you've added already. For future research, you can make sure you collect the info necessary to make a complete and usable citation.

Also, when you add a reference, make sure to include the slash in the closing tag, as in ; you keep leaving the slash out.

Good luck! &mdash;JohnFromPinckney (talk) 09:52, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Sample headline text (unless you add other stuff after the last "=" here)
Bold text

Italic text

Regular text: There was No Love for KCKN AM&FM, Valentine's Day 1977

Special note for Jack Lester: See Cheatsheet for this kind of reminder. Bookmark it in your browser! It's much more urgent to clean up the reference citations. Delete these notes from me to you; they don't belong in the article. Apologies to everyone else.


 * The stuff in this section was a communication from me to User Jack Lester which I had placed on the article page on 13:31(UTC), 22 December 2009. Another user quite appropriately moved it from there to here on the Talk page (although I was really hoping Mr. Lester would just delete it all, although he did remove one of the lines) &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 14:35, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Helping User:Jack Lester fix his citations (December 2009)
Those who have been watching this article may be aware that it has grown quickly in the last two months since its creation, that the citations need expansion, that I've been trying to get the main contributor's attention as he adds content. I figure that we can do the necessary copy editing and re-formatting once all the basic content is in place, with suitable references. We're just not there yet.

To make it easier for User:Jack Lester to update the citations, I have gone through to try to separate identical citations into uniquely named citations. I promised to do this over on Jack's Talk page.

Now, experienced WP editors will be unhappy about the expanded  templates, but I hope we can leave them as is until Jack's citation details can be filled in. I am hoping that leaving the templates un-compacted for a while will help Jack use them despite his dyslexia.

The idea is that Jack Lester can go though the article in edit mode and fill in all the details he has about the sources he used in his research. Actual duplicates and superfluous data can be cleaned up later. Right now, we have too little info; too much info is an easier problem to solve.

I have not yet provided  templates for the nine references to "Kansas Resources, Library of American Broadcasting, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742". I don't know which one to use. Jack: are these books, newspapers, online resources, or what? If they are online resources, I think I can't get to them because I'm not a student (although I tried).

We also need more info about the "Kansas Room", Kansas City, Kansas Public Library. Jack: what's in that room? Display cases? Some knowledgable librarian? A wall chart?

I have also not done anything about the four references to "a b c d e f g h i j". I have no idea what these are supposed to be. Jack?

Lastly, there are a few citations sitting at the beginning of a paragraph or section, where they don't seem to belong. I am guessing that these are leftovers, extras, or experiments, but I have deliberately left them in for Jack to decide about them. Maybe they mean something to him.

I hope all this extra work results in a better final article, and that other editors can be patient while the construction continues. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 15:45, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

More work on the citations (January 2010)
I have seen that User:Jack Lester made a series of edits to improve the citations in the article. He also answered some of my questions on his Talk page. So we are making progress, and I'm pleased to see it.

Perhaps surprisingly, I reverted a bunch of Jack's work, but it's only in an attempt to keep some order to the page. Here's what I did and didn't do; I'll talk about my reasons below. Reverted Jack's removal of references to Kansas City Star, since they were incompletely removed and left the  templates mangled. Retained (or re-added) Jack's new additions of references to "Clipping file from "Kansas Room", Kansas City, Kansas Public Library" and to "Kansas Resources, Library of American Broadcasting, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742". Retained (re-added) Jack's addition of text for new last section. I don't understand what's going to happen to those headings and sample texts, but I'll let Jack sort that out.</li> <li>Reverted, with much trepidation, Jack's partial deletion of all KC Star references.</li> <li>Reverted, with much trepidation, Jack's conversion of all KC Kansan references to Clipping file.</li> <li>Reverted, with much trepidation, Jack's conversion of all but one Broadcasting Yearbook references to Clipping file.</li> <li>Added the reference to the clipping file for all of the existing references to Star and Kansan newspapers and microfilms.</li> <li>Accepted and corrected Jack's attempts to convert references to "a b c d e f g h i j" into refs for Clipping file and/or LAB refs.</li> <li>Removed the note from Jack "to Editor" (I guess he means me) about renumbering references. I think that's all settled now (and the note never belonged in the article anyway).</li></ol>

Jack also provided all of the following additional notes, which I have salvaged from inserted (and reverted) article text and edit summaries: <ol> <li>ALL material is IN the "Kansas Room".</li> <li>I have re-checked and this section is as nearly accurate as my notes recorded sources. [referring to partial deletion of Star references in 'KCKN Pioneers "Countrypolitan Radio" Format in 1957' section]</li> <li>The Univ. of MD data was snail-mailed to me.</li> <li>''Mr. Cramer presented his comments in person. He is in semi-retirement and can be reached at KFKF-FM Radio.''</li> <li>''Please Note: ALL of the "Broadcasting Yearbook" material was either Xeroxed or what librarians call "tear sheets/pages". There is/was no access to "Vol.", "Edition", "No.", etc.''</li></ol>

For Jack and others: Even if the material is found in the "Kansas Room", it's no reason not to try to provide detailed references of where the work originated. This note accompanied the replacement of KC Kansan references by refs to the Clipping file in the "Kansas Room". I reverted those because I didn't want to lose the Kansan source. Jack: Did these items actually come from the Kansas City Kansan (even if you don't know the date or page number)?

I reverted the changes connected to statement (2) above because (in addition to the mangled code) I didn't want to lose the Star source. Jack: Are you saying that these items did not come from the Kansas City Star (even if date or page number are unknown)?

It seems that the snail-mailed materials from the LAB / Univ. of MD would have some notes about their providence. I reverted Jack's changes here because I am hopeful he can provide more info about the materials. Jack: Is there really no note about newspaper name, or year, or writer or anything?

I didn't do anything with the Cramer Symposium references, although I thought if there were written copies provided to the attendees, we might include section names or page numbers or something. (I am not going to try to contact him whether he's retired or not.) I don't know how well these 12(!) references will serve others editors and readers as a reliable source if they can't go and look them up anywhere. Jack: Are you working from notes you scribbled down while at the symposium?

I have reverted the deletion (if that was the intent) of the last 4 references to Broadcasting Yearbook because it's not clear that the info didn't come from there. Even Xeroxed we need to refer to the publication name, if we have it. I don't know anything about what a tear sheet is, but if the data was found in a copy (even of unknown date) of Broadcasting Yearbook, then that's part of what we need to tell about it. It does not matter if it was Xeroxed, mailed to a librarian, photocopied again, scanned, and then provided to you online, we still need to indicate the source (Broadcasting Yearbook) as well as where you got it (the WWW URL or the "Kansas Room" or Al Capone's safe). Jack: Please go back (again, I know) and see what info you can find about the original publication, even if it's incomplete. Fill in what you can. Also, I'm confused about where it came from: did you get the Broadcasting Yearbook stuff from the clipping file or the Univ. of MD?

If I have mangled the repair of the last bunch of citation changes, I am sorry. It looks like Jack was copying and pasting but missed the beginning and end of the things he was replacing. In attempting my repairs, I have tended to leave more, rather than less, of the citations. We can still delete them (cleanly!) when we are sure we can't use them.

Thanks, everyone, for your patience. Sorry about the verbosity. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 14:05, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

What Happened to this Station?
After reading this article, it seems as if KCKN went from being a major Country station to defunct over an unknown period of time. What happened? Did the station get sold? There's a brief mention in a change of call letters, but few, if any, details. Also, it kind of seems like the dates are kind of missing - there are dates for some of the radio personalities, but it seems to be in just a random listing, not in chronological order. Also, some of the abbreviations (I guess) such as PD and ND should be explained at some point. My guess is they stand for Program Director and News Director, but, since I'm not in the radio business, I'm not sure. I ended up here after first going to the page for "The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen", a radio program in the 1930s, sponsored by Skelly Oil. That article mentioned KCKN, but the link went to the KCKN page for a station in Roswell, NM, instead of this page.Jtyroler (talk) 13:41, 13 September 2014 (UTC)