Person talk:James Lowe (17)

Citation formatting [18 August 2022]

Hello Rwbdragon - As a volunteer admin, I do a lot of maintenance-type work, so that the pages here can be optimized for this wiki environment. Wikis are all about links between pages, so a lot of what we do involves fixing links. In this case, there was a user (not you) who uploaded a gedcom in 2020 and inadvertently created a bunch of duplicate Source pages in the process. Unfortunately, after the upload, some users mistakenly linked to these duplicate pages in their citations. So, my job was to find all of those citations and update them to link to the correct Source page. For this page, it was the "Kentucky, County Marriages, 1797-1954" link that initially brought me to this page and to other pages you are watching that had the Source link error.

When I do this type of work, I try to go ahead and fix any other issues that I might see while I have the page open. That is why some of the other citations were also updated.

You asked, "Why are citations being removed?" - I think the only citations removed were the ones citing your MySource "Lowe Family Tree", since the MySource page itself had been previously removed (deleted).[1] This meant that the citation was no longer linked to an existing page.

I did remove some of the text in the citations on the Person page if it was a repeat of the text about the source itself that was already being shown by way of the linked Source page. WeRelate is a little different, since we have Person pages for information about persons, Source pages for information about sources, Repository pages for information about repositories, etc. So, when you build a citation on a Person page, you should only have to enter text in the citation fields that is specific to that particular record, such as a link to specific image, a specific volume or page number, or the actual transcribed or indexed text. If a reader wants more information about the source itself, they can follow the link to the Source page. Likewise, information about where to find the source can be found by following the link to the Repository page from the Source page.

You asked, "Is this box only for transcriptions? If so, where do the actual citations go?" - Yes, the "Text / Transcription location" box is intended to be for entering the actual text from the record or notes about that specific record for that person, but there has been a lot of extra text entered in this field in the past as the site developed, so it is easy to find pages that do not follow this guideline.

I'm not sure what you mean by the second part of the question, but if we look at the example for citation #5:

5. [5], in United States. 1900 U.S. Census Population Schedule. (National Archives Microfilm Publication T623).

Fount Lowe, 1900.

[5] is a direct link to the actual image, followed by information about the source (from the Source page), followed by quoted text from the record's index. You could add more information from the record itself (and some people do), such as the Place covered or page number or transcribe the text from the image instead of just the index, but that additional information was not included in the previous citation either.

I hope I have given you some answers as to why the formatting was updated. In looking over the page again, it looks like there is still some repeated text in some of the citations that could be cleaned up some more. This type of editing is a never-ending process, as the world of internet research and publishing continues to evolve.

I am happy to answer any additional questions you might have. Best wishes, --cos1776 20:45, 18 August 2022 (UTC)