L.tak

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-- 01:10, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Article sources

I notice you've got an article started with a bunch of text written, but no sources listed yet. Note, in the {{Howdy}} template's step-by-step instructions for writing an article, we recommend not only choosing all your sources before you start to write, but also reading them all before you start to write. The Sources section of an article is more than just a list of sources from which all information in the article can be verified; it should also be an accurate accounting of where the information actually came from. --Pi zero (talk) 22:09, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, in view of the vast amount of sources, I did it partly the other way: read everything, but added a suitable selection later... It's my first article and I hate not having submitted yesterday. Only now the media (outside Curacao) are picking it up... ;-) L.tak (talk) 12:54, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Ah.

Three out of five sources non-English, I see. Just letting you know, that could be a serious problem. Sometimes we manage to review and publish articles with non-English sources... more often the review doesn't happen and everyone (writers, reviewers, and innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire) has a miserable time of it. The difficulty, you see, is that if, as usually happens, there are no reviewers available who can more-or-less-fluently read the language of the sources, automatic translation is laughably bad and so the reviewer can't possibly pick up the sort of subtle nuances of meaning that are needed for rigorous source-check during review. (Indeed, with automatic translation often one can't even get anything resembling the basic sense of the meaning, let alone nuances.)

Occasionally we do manage to successfully source-check based on non-English sources, as I say. Usually (though not always) it's because we get help with manual translation from someone who reads the source language fluently... with luck I'll be able to take a look in reasonable time and give you some feedback on what might be needed. Of course when you submitted this, after several days of hardly anything being submitted, suddenly we've got four articles all arriving on the queue in the past seven hours or so.

Btw, there is a mention of non-English sources on one of our official policy pages: WN:Cite sources#Considering the review process. Finding better ways to reconcile non-English sources with our review process, thus giving us access to a wide range of juicy stories on which we might actually scoop the English-language mainstream press, is something we've long wanted to do; alas, it's a refinement we've never been able to devote our attention to because we've got other more fundamental improvements needed to our basic infrastructure. --Pi zero (talk)

Thanks for that extensive explanation... Some differences between the dream (first en-news source) and practice thus... I have found some en-refs now, which tell most of the story. The newspapers "feel" a bit less notable, but I they seem neutral and correct in their reporting (news.google.com does not pick them up however). Let's see if it helps... L.tak (talk) 15:32, 26 September 2012 (UTC)