Talk:Thomas Martin of Palgrave

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Want to help write or improve biographies? Check out WikiProject Biography Tips for writing better articles. -- Yamara ✉  10:44, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Discussion
Initial page taken verbatim from The Dictionary of National Biography, vol 12, 1909, a work in the public domain.

Harvard referencing
I'm sorry to revert Eebahgum's hard work, but WP:Harvard referencing isn't really supposed to be mixed with inline citations... it's either one or the other. --Yamara ✉  22:31, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I meant mixed with footnotes.... --Yamara ✉  22:39, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Yamara, What you say is true, but what you have put into the text includes references direct to MSS sources, which is not permitted in Wikipedia (see WP:OR): also these references to Add MSS require the reader to know without being told that Add MSS is a prefix to certain Manuscript collections in the British Library, which you have not mentioned (even if the intention is merely to inform the reader that this information is derived, in the article's published source material, from such a source). Also you have listed the Add MSS as follow-ons to other, published references in the list of references proper at the bottom, so that you have muddled the published and unpublished sources. Also the published sources are given in abbreviated form, which is inappropriate for Wikipedia (e.g. 'Lownes, Bibl. Man. (Bohm)') as hardly anyone will be able to know what you mean, and they should be given in a normal form. In fact they look as if they have just been copied down from an ancient published source, without any critical revision or attempt to reconcile them with modern forms, let alone Wikipedia conventions. As a wikipedia article, all the references (whether presented in Harvard or inline footnote form) need to be to published sources, in recognisable form, and your add mss references and arcane forms in the reflist fall short of this need. I am keen to see this article remain and improve, and these matters need to be addressed. Eebahgum (talk) 11:08, 12 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Good points about the manuscript references. Please note that the original article post was taken verbatim from The Dictionary of National Biography, a work in the public domain. (I retyped it all in by hand, as the Google copy was very corrupted by the fine print.) It would be this resource that could be cited for anything that is an otherwise unpublished resource. Please also note that I'm not precious over which form of citation is used; it just has to be consistent.


 * Some article history: I came to look for Tom Martin after starting on the Gough Map article that Cory Doctorow called upon boingboing.net members to create. The Gough Map's provenance was deemed a mystery by the British Museum, with "Honest Tom" being the earliest known holder. I found it interesting that he had acquired Peter Le Neve's collection by marrying his widow, and suspected that the Gough Map might have been held by La Neve during his tenure as King of Arms-- though that is entirely OR and conjecture. In any case, Martin seems to have been important among antiquarians. --Yamara ✉  20:44, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. Tom Martin is an important figure in East Anglian archaeology/antiquarianism, as he is a link between Le Neve (getting the papers through the widow) and people like Thomas Gardiner (spelling?) the Dunwich Historian, Thomas Barber the Lowestoft Historian, and the (immortal?) John Ives, Suffolk Herald Extraordinary. The provenances for his MS collections given in the last part of this article are now out of date, but I'm not quite sure how to update them just yet. The Suffolk Institute Library no longer exists as such but is part of Suffolk Record Office I believe. Cullum collections are dispersed as Hawstead is no longer as was. GM-G-C was President of Suffolk Institute at time of that old DNB article. The Scarfe article on Ives has some useful stuff on TM, and one more modern source would be J. M. Blatchly's Topographers of Suffolk (various editions) which usually contains brief but valuable notices. I'll look at it. best wishes, Eebahgum (talk) 23:20, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I think I meant Yarmouth for Barber. Eebahgum (talk) 01:53, 14 March 2008 (UTC)