User talk:Benjaminfranklineaton

Regarding List of places associated with the Burke and Wills expedition, a lot of information has been added to the top of the article without adequate citation and without integrating into the "List of" format. The content is still available within the article History so it is not lost but it needs to be more coherently presented in the list format. Kerry (talk) 09:43, 6 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Kerry, I cannot understand the claim of a lack of citation. What source could be as reliable as Dr Ludwick Becker's diary? That reference covered all the camps up to Kerang. I did not want to interrupt the list because that was what the page was about. Citations were requested and you should thank your lucky stars that I plugged away until I found one that covered Royal Park to Kerang and specified the mysteriously missing camp 2 as well as dismissing the Constitution Hotel and identified Robert Gardiner as Becker's "Mr Gardner" regarding camp 3. It would be impossible to "integrate my findings into the list format" because for example, Campaspe is so vague that assumptions would have to be made to match it with a diary entry. How can you criticise my contribution when the page for William John Turner Clarke states that he arrived in Hobart in 1840 but the cited source says no such thing and actually supplies the exact date on which he arrived on the Deveson in 1929? How can you hide Ludwig Becker's fantastic detail of the time and date at which arrival at and departure from each place took place? In future, I will not submit my corrections on Wikipedia, but just point out (on other formats) any Wikipedia errors that I find, as I did re W.J.T.CLARKE. Benjaminfranklineaton (talk) 13:07, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
 * First, I am not going to say that the article as you found it was in great shape. It wasn't (not a citation to be seen!). But what you added wasn't an improvement.
 * I am not objecting to the use of Becker's diary as a source. However, many of your paragraphs are not cited at all, so it is unclear where the information is coming from. E.g. There is text about the Fanning family, but which source was that from? I quickly checked all of them and didn't see anything about Fanning. But I should not have to check every source, the citation for the text should clearly identify which source.
 * "Presumably", "perhaps", "a trove search", "a google search" seems to suggest that you are describing a research process and drawing your own conclusions about the material in Becker's diary, this is probably in violation with our policy on No Original Research.
 * List articles (such as this is) are expected to be structured in a list-like format (or table format), so you needed to integrate the information you were adding into that list structure. If the content you wanted to add doesn't have that list-like nature, then this the wrong article to be working on.
 * I can see you are a new contributor and I suspect you might benefit from some Wikipedia training. Wikimedia Australia runs a free training course each month via Zoom, the next is Thursday 7 December, followed by a free drop-in session where people can work on whatever article they are interersted in and get help and advice as they do it. Click here to register. Alternatively if that time does not suit, often a volunteer can be found to do a session with you at another time.
 * I also want to stress the material you added is not "gone forever". Every version of a Wikipedia article is saved. The version after your contribution is here so you do not have to re-type any of that material, it can be copied and pasted when you have a clearer understanding of what you want to add and where.
 * If you see an error in a Wikipedia article, there are two ways to address the issue. For a simple issue like the date of arrival in Hobart being wrong (doesn't match what the source says), it is perfectly ok to just change the year in the article text with an edit summary "changed the year to match what the ADB said". I have fixed that article along those lines. The second method for a more complex issue (a major restructuring of an article or where are sources saying different things) is to write on the article's Talk page, in this case Talk:William_John_Turner_Clarke. Every Wikipedia article has a Talk page and it is where we discuss issues about an article and how to improve it. It is not ok to add "WRONG, 1829 AS THE SOURCE STATES". We generally do not talk about the article's development or its problems in front of the reader except where we need to advice the reader to be cautious. The most common example of this is the "citation needed" message, where we alert the reader that no source has been provided for the statement.
 * So I hope you will continue to contribute to Wikipedia but I think getting some training and starting with small improvements is better than jumping in with some big changes without understanding how Wikipedia operates. Kerry (talk) 00:09, 8 November 2023 (UTC)