Talk:Theophilus Cazenove

Only one source, no inline citations
This article has only one source, and no inline citations. Made it class=stub. --DThomsen8 (talk) 23:45, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Non-helpful Links
This is a general comment / question on links on Wikipedia and other Internet sites that are of hardly any practical value.

Here's the example from the article:

"Cazenove lived well as a financier and was known for his generosity. His business dealings were not particularly successful and the investors barely made any profit, even losing money in the Pennsylvania land dealings which he organized with James Wilson."

In the above sentence (currently--I might change it before you see the original), Pennsylvania is set up as a link, to the Wikipedia article on Pennsylvania.

Now, there are a number of points I'd make here:


 * a person reading that sentence and looking for more information about those land dealings does not want to go to a general article on Pennsylvania
 * subpoint: possibly that would be OK if the article dealt with those land dealings, and, even better, the link was to the section of the general article that deals with those land dealings. I don't believe it does--I searched for both Cazenove and Wilson in the Pennsylvania article with no success.  (Now I've also searched for land in the article, found lots of hits, things like Maryland, England, Rhode Island, upland, ..., but nothing about these land dealings (for example, no instance of the word land in or around the time of the Revolutionary War (I mean, like between 1760 and 1800).

So, imho, that link to Pennsylvania is not of any value.

Now, I can imagine that, at one time, somebody left an "open link" to "Pennsylvania land dealings" (by that, I mean a link to a non-existing page, hoping that sooner or later such a page would exist). Then its possible somebody else came along and, in an effort to be helpful, changed the link to just link to "Pennsylvania" on the basis that such is a valid link.

That was not really helpful in terms of this article.

Does Wikipedia have any kind of policy that addresses this kind of thing?

Rhkramer (talk) 13:59, 24 June 2011 (UTC)