User talk:Rag-and-Bone Shop

October 2017
Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed that your username, "Rag-and-Bone Shop", may not meet Wikipedia's username policy because it seems to be that of an organization. If you believe that your username does not violate our policy, please leave a note here explaining why. As an alternative, you may ask for a change of username by completing this form, or you may simply create a new account for editing. Thank you. 331dot (talk) 08:49, 28 October 2017 (UTC).

Note to editor: Rag-and-Bone Shop is not a reference to a company, but rather to a line in a W. B. Yeats poem.
 * Thank you for your answer. I apologize for disturbing you. 331dot (talk) 09:24, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Bare URLs
Howdy. I noticed that you've been adding a lot of bare URLs as references to the article on Richard Bourke. As described in this guide, adding bare URLs is not best practice on Wikipedia. This is primarily because bare URLs make it harder to combat link rot: if an online source moves to another page or its URL is modified in some way, it is much easier to re-locate the source if more info (e.g., author, title, publisher, date) is added to a citation in addition to a plain link. Wikipedia provides a "Cite web" template to make formatting all this information easier. The template can be brought up by hitting "Cite" on the edit bar, opening the "Templates" drop down menu, and then clicking "cite web". See this page for a full description of the template.

Avoiding bare URLs really is important. I haven't been editing Wikipedia for too long, but I've already repaired a number of dead links. I was only able to fix those links because the citations they were a part of included additional info like author and publication date as I described above. If it was just the URLs by themselves, I don't think I could have repaired them.

In light of this, I've added a template to the article noting the use of bare URLs. Once you or other editors have fleshed out the references that are in danger of link rot, feel free to remove the template.

Regards, Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 01:34, 5 November 2017 (UTC)