User talk:Cchkalthoff

Re: Your May 30 contributions to Gray Wolf
Please don't take this in an unkind light, but I am reverting your edits to Gray Wolf that you furnished first on 29 May and reintroduced on 30 May. The first edits were reverted by UtherSRG; it was not clear to this editor how the references you furnished backed up the assertions made in your main contributions. I am reverting for pretty much the same reason, which are mainly technical in nature but important, especially for articles which are featured, for better or worse, a mark of quality assurance. Particulars follow.


 * Citation template are the norm for this article. To use these templates properly, you need to furnish fairly targeted references, particular authors, specific works, exact page numbers, supporting publishers and the like. Filling out these templates require more effort on behalf of the contributing editor; so be it. The policy of verifiability places the responsibility of furnishing reliable references on the shoulders of the contributing editor in the service of the reader, who should be given the ability to quickly look up the supporting reference, and directly find supporting material without the need to hunt. In contrast, the style of directly linking to a web page, as you have done, places a burden on the reader, who has to figure out in what manner a reference web page supports assertions in the article. The style of directly linking to a web page does not furnish a framework for the contributing editor to note meta data about the reference (author, title, page numbers, publishers,and the like). It is due to this lack of framework that direct web page references are  not generally used on featured articles.
 * One contribution you made is about how the present range of the Gray wolf is so diminished compared to historical times. You've based the assertion on a direct web link to a top-level directory page at the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It is not clear from the welter of links stemming from that page where one might find the particulars of the historical species range your contribution asserts. Apart from being a poorly formatted reference, the web page as provided does not furnish underlying information. Much the same can be said about the following paragraph, essentially a reiteration of the antecedent, that, in addition to the same U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service web page, offers as a backing reference the broad and general sentiments of an author of a children's book. Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with offering a children's book as a reference, when that fact is made clear in a carefully composed citation, using a template like . This gives readers and other editors sufficient meta data about the reference to decide if it has sufficient authority to back the assertions of the contribution. In this particular case, Mr London, in his capacity of a fiction writer for young readers, lacks sufficient authority to support assertions made in this Wikipedia article, at least in my humble opinion. However, you did not fashion the reference with any regard to furnishing this kind of meta data; you used the direct link furnished by Google books when you offered the search phrase "Gray Wolf and their environment" so it is not immediately, manifestly clear to me or any other reader or editor where your backing reference is, its title, publisher, or date of publication. Please look at the wiki sources of this page to see how I constructed the book citation, it is done in the manner in which you should have cited Mr London's book.
 * The reference backing the assertion of Oregon State University is not a good quality reference source, since news services turn their content over frequently, and footprints are not always available in the Internet archives like the Wayback Machine. Before touching the article in Wikipedia, I would have gone to a decent library and looked up the references cited in the OSU news article and based my contribution on those instead.
 * The grammar of the sentence backed up by the Oregon State University reference should have been checked. The plurality of the verb disagrees with the subject (There is only one Oregon State University so it 'has' evidence). The prepositional phrase as of October 29, 2003 modifies the participle must be introduced conveying a specific deadline for when wolves are to be reintroduced into wherever it is they are to be reintroduced. It probably wasn't your intention to set deadlines, but, with the modifying prepositional phrase misplaced, that is what your sentence ends up conveying. Poorly constructed, backed by a weak reference, the final insult comes from the fact that other parts of the article have already covered the rebalancing of the food chain with the wolf's reintroduction into the Yellowstone. See the last paragraph in the section.
 * Gray Wolf is a featured article. As you may have gathered, contributing to a featured article often takes more effort, given the visibility of these articles and the expectations of editors who routinely support them. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but its the neutral, well composed and carefully verified edits that remain, especially in featured articles.

All of this was offered in the spirit of making a better editor of you, not just of Wikipedia, but of any piece of writing you may happen to take up — such as your resume. While I look forward to future edits from you, please do not directly reintroduce this particular effort for a third time sans modification, without addressing these technical issues. If you are unsure on how to do this, write up the proposed edit change on the talk page. Thank you! — Gosgood 17:06, 20 June 2007 (UTC)