User talk:Captain sky 27

Vancouver hip hop
You can't use Blogspot blogs as sources for Wikipedia content, per WP:BLOGS, WP:USERG and WP:SELFPUB. If you want to add content to Canadian hip hop about the early scene in Vancouver, you need to show real media coverage in real media (Vancouver Sun, The Province, the Georgia Straight, the news divisions of the national networks, Exclaim!, BeatRoute, etc.) and/or published books, not blogs. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 17:38, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Ladies Delight
Just like what I told you a few months ago, you can't use people's personal blogs to source Wikipedia content. If you want our article to say that another Canadian rap single was released three years before the song that most media to date have labelled as "the first Canadian rap song", you cannot reference that claim to somebody's personal Medium blog — you have to reference it to real journalism in real media. To be clear, I'm not saying that the claim is incorrect — it seems very plausible that a Canadian hip hop song was released in 1979 but got overlooked — but we still can't use writers' personal blogs to source content that hasn't been reported by real media. With a bit of research, I have found a stronger source that's more appropriate for use, so I'll be rewriting the section to use that source instead of a Medium blog. Bearcat (talk) 16:48, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello, I've never responded on here before so I hope I'm doing it correctly. I respect your decision. Sometimes, however, so-called "real" media gets it wrong. With regards to Vancouver hip-hop, an article from the Georgia Straight in 2007 has numerous erroneous claims and it's often cited, not just on Wikipedia. But again, I respect your decision. Cheers. CaptainSky27 (talk)
 * Believe me, I'm aware that even media sometimes make mistakes. We had a very similar situation in the 2010s, with media spending years crediting a man named Robert Douglas Cook as Canada's first-ever openly gay candidate for political office — so we followed the media and replicated that claim, and in turn still other media repeated that claim some more because they got it from us. Then, years later, I came across an article about somebody else, which claimed that he had been Canada's first openly gay candidate for political office eight years before Robert Douglas Cook — and upon careful research, I found that the new source was actually correct, and on top of that there had even been several other openly gay or lesbian candidates for political office between this other guy and Cook. Not only was Cook not the first, he wasn't even in the first five.
 * We'll probably never know who originally started the erroneous claims that either Robert Douglas Cook or "The Bum Rap" were the first of their ilk, but I do have a working theory as to how they got led astray — out of all of the openly gay or lesbian people who ran for political office in Canada in the 1970s, Cook was unique in running for a minor new political party that had the word "Gay" in its name, whereas the others who came before him had all run as candidates of regular (if sometimes still fringy) political parties or for non-partisan offices. So whoever started that claim found Cook because his political "party" was an explicitly gay-identified organization, and stopped there without digging any further. And I think that's probably what happened here too: "The Bum Rap" turned up easily because it actually had the word "Rap" in its title, so whoever originally ascribed it with firstness stopped there and didn't dig any deeper.
 * But just to clarify, the reason we have to rely on media rather than blogs is that it's entirely possible for blogs to make claims that are not just inaccurate, but deliberately false. We have, for example, had numerous instances where musicians have issued press releases that made false claims about Billboard chart hits that they didn't actually have, suckered a blog into mentioning that chart position in an entry about that musician, and then used that blog entry to claim that they were now entitled to a Wikipedia article on the basis of passing WP:NMUSIC's "has had a single or album on any country's national music chart" criterion — but then when we actually checked the claim against the real Billboard charts, the claim turned out to be false.
 * We don't necessarily know what fact-checking standards a blogger has or hasn't applied to the content they published on their blog, which is why we can't take blogs as reliable sources. And even though it is true that media can make mistakes too, we still need a real media outlet to publish and report the updated information before we can change it on here. (As well, although I obviously don't have concrete proof that you are Niel Scobie, I have some reason to believe you might be — so if you are, then you also need to read our rules around adding self-citations to your own work to Wikipedia: namely, it isn't strictly prohibited, but you should still try to avoid it, and even if you are determined to do it you still need to cite actual books or newspaper/magazine articles rather than a blog.)
 * You'll note that I've already updated the information about "Ladies' Delight" with a better media source for it. But I hope this explains the reason why we needed to find a better source first, and couldn't just rest on a blog entry. Bearcat (talk) 18:28, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. As I said, I understand the decision, and in my overzealousness to submit new information to the wiki page, I should've been more careful with the citations. Next time, when sourcing, I'll use traditional media. I assure you, it wasn't a matter of self-aggrandizement, but rather to recognize the accomplishments of Jay McGee/Mr Q, who recently passed. I've been in touch with his family and wanted them to know this information as well. I've known about these early rap records for a few years now as it's part of the academic research I've been conducting since 2016 (yes, I'm Niel Scobie) and it always kills me to see or hear people stating "Bum Rap" was the first Canadian rap record, when it's not even close. I often thought, "how can this still be on Wikipedia?" So when I heard that Jay McGee/Mr Q died recently, I thought I'd set the record straight. The source that you found coincidentally was published this week. So I was surprised to see the link. I didn't know anyone else who was researching this, but it appears that the author and I have been chasing down the same people. That's cool with me, though. The more this music is celebrated, the better. Thanks again for the explanation, I appreciate your time. Cheers.