User talk:ANewtThatGotBetter

April 2023
Hi and welcome to Wikipedia! Thanks for your edit to Pied Piper of Hamelin. However I have reverted it because you replaced a reference to a secondary source with a primary source. Wikipedia prefers secondary sources where possible. Please read WP:PRIMARY and WP:RS for more information about this. Thanks! CodeTalker (talk) 18:17, 15 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Dear Code Talker,
 * thank you for the warm welcome! It seems like I have a lot to learn!
 * I just read the policy on primary sources and I am just wondering:
 * Is it not in the best interest of an informative article about the Pied Piper to add the information (shelfmark) of the oldest manuscript transmitting the story and citing the library's website as both a primary and secondary source? The link leads to both the digitized scan and the contents of the manuscript, and it is a reputable source as well. It seems to me a bit more reliable and informative than the mention of a "dusty old chronicle" in a 1955 publication.
 * Thank you and cheers! ANewtThatGotBetter (talk) 19:43, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * This is somewhat counterintuitive and many new users trip up on this, but generally we prefer to use secondary sources that analyze and interpret the original source, rather than the original source itself. Most readers of Wikipedia do not have the skills to read and interpret a medieval manuscript, or to understand the nuances of language and handwriting that might be necessary to fully understand it. What we care about is what current scholarship thinks about the manuscript, which is best presented by citing the modern scholarship rather than the original document. In this particular case, the choice of citation of the Richter Collection above the original manuscript is admittedly not great, since neither one is an analysis of the text, but we can at least rely on the reliability of the Saturday Evening Post to accept that the manuscript has been quoted and translated correctly, and the reader can check that source to verify that Wikipedia is correctly following what the source says. By contrast, verifying the Handschriftendatenbank citation would require the reader to have expertise that we don't expect the average Wikipedia reader to have. I hope this helps clear this up. CodeTalker (talk) 20:06, 15 April 2023 (UTC)