Talk:Trolleybuses in San Francisco

Electric motor issues edit
This and this suggest there might be something to the claims of poor performance. Anmccaff (talk) 07:04, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

"Retired fleet" table removed
Per WP:RS and WP:VERIFY, I removed the "Retired fleet" table (the last version of which is archived here) that was recently added by User:Mliu92, because it was sourced almost entirely to an unreliable source, a fan website (trolleybuses.net) that is edited by a single person and does not represent any organization (in other words, there is no accountability for errors). Although that website has a lot of interesting information, it also has a lot of errors and is not an appropriate source for Wikipedia. Huge tables with lots of detail like the one added here by Mliu92, which had no less than 126 cells, not counting the image column, also really should include inline citations for every detail unless – and this would be much better – the details are given in prose text and with citations of (reliable) sources there, with the table just summarizing the details already mentioned in prose. (That is essentially what this article has done for the current fleet.) Choosing just one example, the cited web page gives no information for what years most of the different makes were retired, and yet the table added to this article gave that information for all of them and implied that the source it cited (for the entire table) covers it.

The table's lack of inline citations is an additional issue, but the largest problem is that the cited source is not reliable. Reliable sources are things such as books, magazines, and official websites of government entities. Websites of organizations can be OK if the organization has elected officers, because then there is a stronger possibility of accountability for errors, which encourages more careful fact-checking before information is posted on the organization's site, and faster correction of identified errors. The information in this table has been published in books, magazines and other reliable sources. If someone wants to add a table like this, but does not have access to such sources, then he simply should not add the table at all. Trolleybus fans who are looking for that information and do not care whether it is reliable or not can find it on transit-fan websites. It does not need to be on Wikipedia. And it shouldn't be on Wikipedia unless it can cite a reliable source. Wikipedia is for a broad audience, not just transit fans.

The two separate problems I have mentioned, affecting virtually the entire table, were justification to delete the table, for now, rather than just adding a cleanup tag. If Mliu92 wishes to recreate it, with reliable sourcing and inline sourcing, he should work on it offline and repost only after it has been brought up to Wikipedia standards (standards based on policy, not just looking at other articles). I replaced it with the start of a prose section that can, and hopefully will, be expanded with reliably sourced information and extensive inline citations. SJ Morg (talk) 10:11, 7 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks and I understand the rationale behind the deletion of the table. Cheers, Mliu92 (talk) 14:49, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you. – SJ Morg (talk) 07:59, 8 February 2019 (UTC)