User talk:Ikbenlike

Welcome!
Hello, Ikbenlike, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:


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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Mathglot (talk) 00:36, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Verifiability, sources, and in-text attribution
Thanks for your concern about the reliability of the source in this edit at Communism and LGBT rights. The Veriability policy governs how to support content in Wikipedia articles. That said, sources are generally considered either reliable, or unreliable (sometimes, reliable for one thing, but not another; like for example, a corporate oil website could be reliable for claims about their own mission statement and CEO, but not about assertions about their impact on public health and the environment).

However, in that edit, you tagged a source as unreliable, because "The source does not provide a source for the claim this source is used to support in this article." However, the Verifiability policy has no requirement that reliable sources provide references to other reliable sources. It is a valid question to ask whether the source you tagged, politicalaffairs.net, is reliable or not; in general, if it is, you can use it; and if it isn't, you can't; although it's a bit more complicated than that. If you are not sure, you can ask at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard. There is another wrinkle: even if a source is generally unreliable, they can be used for in-text attribution. In this case, the Wikipedia article says that, "Norman Markowitz, writing for politicalaffairs.net, writes that..." followed by a quotation about what he wrote in his article. For something like this, even a generally unreliable source for matters of fact, is reliable for what appeared in the source itself.

Made-up example: "John Q. Utterquack, writing in the Flat Earth Society Journal, said, 'You can see that the moon is flat, just by looking at it.' " In this case, the Flat Earth Society Journal, even though unreliable for matters of astronomy, is considered reliable for what actually appeared, or didn't appear, in the journal itself. Since there is in-text attribution, and the assertion in the made-up example, is that Utterquack made the claim about the Moon, not that it is true, the generally unreliable source may be used in this case, because he actually did say that. Do you follow?

Your change to Communism and LGBT rights is like the made-up example. Regardless whether Markowitz is right about Marx or not, the Wikipedia article is not making the assertion that he is in Wikipedia's voice; it is only saying that Markowitz made that claim; right or wrong. Therefore, the reference is reliable, and does not need to be tagged.

I hope this was helpful to you. This is kind of a very technical point, and I'm sorry you ran into it on one of your first edits; even some experienced Wikipedia editors aren't too clear about this point,   But, the fact that you are concerned about Wikipedia's core policy of WP:Verifiability is a very good sign, and I am sure you will make a good editor. So, I hope you stick around, and try again. We all get reverted sometimes; especially when startinig out, so just shrug it off, and go make some more edits! And feel free to ping me anytime, or write me on my Talk page, if you have any questions. Mathglot (talk) 01:09, 27 March 2020 (UTC)