User talk:Clifffeld

Hello,

Welcome to Wikipedia. I've undone your recent change to the Herman Wouk article pending some further discussion. I noticed that you cited the information to "Personal communication, Letter". While this would be a perfectly fine citation for a book or a journal article, it is problematic for Wikipedia's purposes. How would we verify that such a letter exists? Is it in an archive somewhere? If a reader saw a citation like this in a book or a journal article they would know the author's name and could reasonably expect, based on the reputation of the author and the publisher, that the citation was accurate and that the document said what the author claimed it was saying. Given that Wikipedia editors are anonymous people on the Internet, it is much more difficult to trust a claim about an unpublished primary source. My recommendation would be to determine whether this statement appears in a reliable secondary source such as a biography or a newspaper article and then cite that source rather than the letter itself. You may wish to take a look at the following policies: WP:PRIMARY and Verifiability. GabrielF (talk) 02:14, 9 September 2013 (UTC)