User talk:Railway historian

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Happy editing! Cheers, ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 18:43, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Hawksworth
Hi. You will see that I have twice removed your update to Frederick Hawksworth. I want to reassure you that this is not because I do not want you to add that information, just that you were not going about it in the right way.

Wikipedia is not a definitive source of correct information about subjects (though we would like it to come close). It is actually a record of what independent reliable sources (which may be books, websites, journals or other publications) have said about the subject. It may happen that different reliable sources have disagreed with each other on the facts. Just because a source has not always got it right does not stop it from being a reliable source by Wikipedia's definition; nobody is perfect. What Wikipedia does in such a case is to present both sets of facts, as neutrally as possible, giving whatever supporting evidence is available to each side. What Wikipedia should not do is decide which version is correct and only present that side. After all, we are not perfect either.

The other thing that Wikipedia does is to provide citations to the sources so that readers and other editors can follow them up, and see whether that the article communicates the content of the sources correctly and clearly. Because this is at the heart of Wikipedia's use of information, there are proper ways of presenting citations so that enough information is stored about the source, while not cluttering up the text of the article. The book by Summers that you cited would be entered into the article as:  (page numbers given as an example only), which gives a reference thus:

I would encourage you to edit the Hawksworth article again. After the paragraph about the hypothetical Pacific, you could add another paragraph stating that another author disagrees, presenting the facts based on the new source, and adding a citation (as above) at the end. I belive that the story about Hawksworth designing the Pacific is alleged to come from a book by O. S. Nock? If you could track that down and cite it as well - even as the original source of the misinformation - that would be of value to readers in assessing the conflicting evidence.

All the best with your future editing. -- Verbarson talkedits 10:59, 17 October 2022 (UTC)