User talk:68.39.174.238/Wikipedia as she is used

Since the recent buissiness with Siegenthaler, this info may help determining if an article's information is legitimate:

Notes on using these notes
Each of these unique "tests" indicates, directly or inferably, whether it's positively or negatively suggestive. That is, if what it's talking about is true, whether that suggests it's reliable or unreliable. It should also be noted that none of these tests are conclusive, the only totally conclusive test is checking with authoritative sources. This is designed to give an idea of the validity of the sources

Assuming that you've found the information already (Searching is covered elsewhere):

Initial impressions
In many cases dubious information stands out at a light read or glance:

Poor spelling, grammar and capitalizations are dead giveaways (Note that "bad grammar" is more along the lines of leaving out period at the end of sentences or not capitalizing the first letter of a sentence, not so much getting "its" and "it's" confused.)

Also check for formatting issues, such as spaces at the start of each paragraph, which give the text a look

something like this

In the case of poor langauge skills, it makes that particular text suspiscious, as it may have been added by a careless prankster (Such as a student, which occurs fairly regularly). Formatting indicates that the person adding it is somewhat new to MediaWiki formatting (Somewhat concern-worthy) and the entry is new (Warrant for caution), as poor formatting is the easiest thing to fix, and is usually fixed before anything else is (And frequently it's impossible to fix anything else without getting decent formatting in place). An example:

Close readings
Reading more closely any possibly suspiscious grammar should be noticable. Also, are there any noticable contradictions? Does it say the same thing twice, or the same things was was said elsewhere on the page?

Cross references
Also, check and and see if there are any inter-WikipediA links. As an example, go to, say West Virginia. Note the spread of blue links that go to other WikipediA pages. This indicates it's been added by someone with some degree of knowledge of MediaWiki, or it's been seen by many eyes. An example of an articel with little oversight: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_Community_School_%28USA%29&oldid=31514991 ; note that this is an old version. See International Community School (USA) for the current revision. This is also related to "Tags" below.

Corroboration
If some text has an larger article on it, or deals with something that could be spread over multiple pages, check the other occurences of the information and see if it agrees. An example: Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Equal protection clause, which likely repeat much of the same material could be used to check and corroborate each other.

Tags
A quick scan of the page should show up any tags on the page. Usually they'll be at the top, however they can be in a section if they relate only to it, some show up at the end. Rarely they show up as tags within the text (When this happens they'll say "(disputed — See talk page). Depending on the advice it may be ignorable or not.

Some templates to be careful of (Click on the links to see what they look like):

Unreferenced — Means there are no sources to back this up.

wikify — Ostensably this means it needs formatting with sections and wikilinks, however in practice it also means that it is new and hasn't been edited by many people. Frequently people will see a new page, know it needs editing, but beyond some basic work just slap this on it and forget it.

POV — Means what it says, parts of the articel may be taking someones side and are that unreliable.

cleanup-tone — May not be outright biased, but has a tone that doesn't sound right coming from a modern encyclopedia. An example might be this text.

contradict — Relatively rare, it means that the articel says two things that blatantly oppose each other. Doesn't show up alot.

afd and any template with that grey color — This page is up for deletion. This is a guarnateed danger sign. Check the "this articel's entry" to see what people say is so bad about it.

nonsense and any template with that pink color — This is up for immediate deletion. Do NOT trust anything in here unless it can be verified from a totally independant, trustworthy source.

There are others, but those are some of the more common ones. In cases where there's a link to the talk page, check it out and see what the problem is. It may only affect one section, or be largely remediated by now.