User:CliffC/Sandbox2

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You say that in some cases I chose "a sentence completely at random"?!? Not at all. I rechecked each citation added, and for each the quote was taken straight from the top of the lead paragraph. Next, you say "Most news articles aren't written in summary-style." Perhaps, but NY Times articles for the Chesimard era are, starting from her earliest mention in the April 6 1971 hotel guest robbery attempt. All one would need do to verify this is use the Times search facility, free, and look at a few leads, also free. In any event, I will not attempt to include such quotes here in the future, I don't want to "clog the notes" with summaries of unbiased contemporary reporting. --CliffC (talk) 03:43, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
I was referring to the quote you used for reference #15 in this version of the article; I meant no disrespect, only that I could not ferret out the rationale for that selection. If you think that readers will benefit from reading the first sentence of the article, I would not object to adding a link to the nyt database (my other misgivings about linking to a commercial website mostly notwithstanding). I think that not to far in the future, we will be able to link to the full-text of these articles. Btw, NYT articles tend or order facts by what they percieve to be the order of importance instead of summarizing, which I admit is similar in some cases. Savidan 04:01, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
Ah, I see now why the quote for reference 15 would be confusing. When I edited on October 18 (diff) with the summary "link to online copy of citation" all I did was provide an online link to a Times item already cited five times. I thought its first paragraph with the "cop killer" phrase was a bit inflammatory, so I quoted a paragraph further down that I thought better summed up the article (which is not really an article but an opinion piece, as evinced by the word "SOAPBOX" in its title, written by a Princeton professor).
That said, a closer look at the version of Assata that existed immediately before my first edits (October 9, here) seems to show some sort of a past mixup, in that the reference (#13 here) does not seem to support any of the five statements citing it, possibly contributing to the confusion. To correct the situation I recommend we simply drop all citations to this reference, no harm done. (The situation may also demonstrate that you and I are the only ones who actually read the material cited!) --CliffC (talk) 16:11, 7 June 2008 (UTC)