User talk:Backroomboy

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Nigel Balchin citations
Hang on! Welcome to Wikipedia - but before you wade too deeply into this, bear in mind that significant material needs citation in reliable published sources (see Verifiability). For instance, where is there verification for this?
 * Whilst seconded to Rowntree's, he was intimately involved in the design and marketing of Black Magic chocolates. In 1935 he was taken onto the staff of Rowntree's, becoming assistant to the Chairman, Seebohm Rowntree

It's also considered bad etiquette to remove existing properly cited material: much of the article comes from the ODNB, a major reference you removed and which provided the details about his involvement with Aero and Kit-Kat.
 * PS Secondary sources are preferable to primary, if available. They're generally easier to find for anyone who needs to verify. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 17:42, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

It's my first time on Wikipedia so apologies if I am not fully up to speed on the etiquette. I had not meant to significantly alter the article, merely to amend errors and provide some extra information where I felt it was needed. I was in the process of sorting out the references but before I could finish someone jumped in and changed them for me. However, the changes look OK to me so let's leave it at that. I have been researching Balchin for over 4 years and am writing his biography. I have access to a great deal of information, much of it unpublished and thus not easy to reference. I agree that the DNB article should be referenced somewhere but do bear in mind that it contains a number of mistakes (some of which I have corrected online). In particular, the word "boffin" does not appear anywhere in The Small Back Room. My revisions were partly intended to remove unjustified claims such as those concerning KitKat and Aero: to date I have found no evidence for these and even Balchin's own family don't make these claims for him. Please feel free to contact me again if I can clarify any of my edits.Backroomboy (talk) 18:42, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
 * In which case, sorry about reading the riot act! There's a standard welcome template that has a few useful links; I've added it above. If you want any help with how things work, let me know.
 * In this particular situation, probably the chief things to be aware of are, as I said, that Wikipedia is a project to collect previously published material (WP:Verifiability and WP:Reliable sources explain the scope of this; and that there's a No original research policy (which essentially says unpublished personal knowledge isn't admissible).
 * These can be a bit non-intuitive, but it's the only way in an open-access encyclopedia to gauge reliability: to show that a generally-accepted publication says whatever (since the normal assessment-by-personal-reputation is out of the window). It does, however, mean that published trumps unpublished. As WP:V says "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth". But generally, if something starts looking very untrue, it's usually not corroborated by multiple sources: raise it on the Talk page, and there's a good chance of getting a consensus to remove it. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 20:43, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your help. I wasn't planning on editing anything other than Nigel Balchin at this stage but your information will I'm sure be useful in the future. One other reference you could add in support of the Black Magic piece would be this one: Nigel Balchin by Derek Collett, Book and Magazine Collector, issue 301, December 2008. I assume it would be bad form for me to reference my own article! I can send you a copy of it if you like.Backroomboy (talk) 17:07, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Done. Sorry about the delay: Christmas rush at work. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 01:44, 19 December 2008 (UTC)