Talk:Howel Williams

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On 4 March 2007 Mattisse tagged the article as "needs better sourcing & intext citations".

I just looked the article over, and it looks like a pretty standard, decent Wikipedia short bio, so I'm not sure what this editor has in mind.

Cheers, Pete Tillman 20:48, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I may have gone overboard there. Technically, a list of references at the end without page numbers and intext citations is insufficient according to WP:ATT except on very short articles. Since yours is short, I probably should not have tagged it, though the long list of references without citations makes the references meaningless. Someone would have to look in all of them to verify information. It makes the article look bad.

I think the real danger for the article is that over time, people will add to the article. Since the precedent has been set not to reference additions, they will not bother to do so. If you want to challenge anything someone adds, you will not be able to do so since nothing is referenced. Also, at some point the article may become longer and will need intext citations. Unless you put the information there yourself, you will not know the reference and be able to check on its accuracy. It is very hard at that point to go back and put footnotes in later. It is easy in the beginning if you do it when you are writing the article.

I guess I was thinking it was setting up a bad precedent. Technically, editors are within their rights to remove any material lacking intext citations in an article, so the best way to protect it is to use proper citing. But maybe this article is unlikely to grow more important so it does not matter in this case. Sincerely, Mattisse 20:29, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I removed the tags per our discussion. (That isn't OR is it when you say "Williams was a master of the art of field sketching . . ."?) Sincerely, Mattisse 14:20, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Just to clarify, the pub list preceded me, and I agree it could use cleanup [puts on ever-lengthening list].

I was briefly a student of HW in the early 70's, in Guatemala. He was in his 70's then, but could still out-walk many of the 20-somethings in the course. Quite a guy!

Cheers, Pete Tillman 18:05, 18 March 2007 (UTC)