Talk:Wealthiest Americans (1957)
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[edit] Publication name question
Is the referenced "New York Times" what is today The New York Times? I know newspapers sometimes changed their names over the years. I didn't want to change it without checking with the original editor, though. Thanks.—Chidom talk 06:40, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I just went online and had a look at the front page of the newspaper for that time period—it was called The New York Times then, too. I'll change the references here; if another publication is being referenced, make a note about that on this page, please. Thanks.—Chidom talk 06:43, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
- I must have been having a cranial inversion. You are correct that the name of the newpaper was The New York Times, but per MLA citation rules, any leading articles should be omitted from the citation, so it should just be New York Times. Wikipedia just says "the name of the newspaper," but among the references for the WP citation style is the MLA handbook. I just learned from checking the MLA reference that the order of citation is also covered under the rule and is alphabetical by author or title (omiting any leading articles A, An, The). I didn't cite by that rule, putting instead the key article from Fortune and then other Times articles I had used not in any particular order. I think a lot of wikipedia articles are going to need attention to set that right, although I didn't see anything that specifically stated it as a WP style issue, so I'm going to let it go.David 13:10, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm... I would strongly disagree with MLA's stance that leading articles that are actual parts of publication/periodical, etc. names should be omitted, but what do I know? I just have a difficult time not using the actual name of the publication or other source. (I've racked my brain trying to come up with an example where leaving off the leading article would lead to doubts as to what was intended; I am fairly sure that such an example exists, but I can't think of one.)
I tend to prefer to use the templates at Wikipedia:Citation templates if for no other reason that it helps me avoid leaving out information. These show up as footnotes, which I also prefer (especially over in-line HTML references that only show a hyperlinked number and an arrow—how is one to know where clicking the link will take them?).
Other reasons I prefer using the templates are: the order of the footnotes corresponds to when the information is referenced in the article; you don't have to read all the references to find the one you want. Additionally, being a lazy person, someone else has gone to the trouble to make it easy for me to just plug in information and not worry about formatting, etc..
Wikipedia doesn't seem to have a preferred style but does ask that the style be consistent for an article—which is why I changed my reference to the currency conversions to resemble yours, rather than the footnote I had at first. I'm always much more concerned with sources being cited than the style used to convey the information.
In case you were wondering, the reason I got involved in the article was that it triggered a concern about copyright violations (Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems#Feedback requested); since I didn't have access to the original material to make a judgment about the quantity of information that was copied directly from the source, I made some rather severe edits to the list in order to use the information, not copy/repeat it wholesale. Other than that, I was born in the year in question, but was hardly concerned with who the wealthiest people were that year—or, for that matter, any year since. <grin>
Back to the content of the article for a moment, though. I would appreciate your reviewing the edited list to ensure that I didn't misstate the source of an individual's wealth. For instance, there would be a difference between "(inherited: Ford Motor Company)" and "(inherited, Ford Motor Company)". I find it difficult at times to see the punctuation very clearly when in reading mode rather than editing mode, so I may have omitted information that was separate from a source of the inherited wealth.
Thanks.—Chidom talk 02:34, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
