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How can "a terrorist attack" target the military? Isn't targeting the military the definition of non-terroristic violence? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 170.140.56.68 ( talk) 20:48, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Humata, I have reverted those changes. I've never heard of an article being "overfootnoted". These are cites from a WP:RS, mainly the New York Times. The quotes you so happily deleted are the leads from each article cited, that's why the {{ cite}} template has a "quote=" parameter . And I see no "trivia" in the article. -- CliffC ( talk) 13:18, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
(This section copied from Wikipedia:Editor assistance/Requests for the record)
I am the original writer of Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. Expecting parts to be challenged, I cited it thoroughly, using 12 sources – 11 in the New York Times and one at a Weather Underground figure's website. Each citation used the {{ cite news}} template with its "quote=" parameter, and each citation included the cited story's lead paragraph as the "quote=" value. The idea was to provide footnote followers the essence of each story so they could decide whether to click on through to the page-image PDF of the original. I believe this is fair use.
Between the article's first posting last year and April 22 it drew only a few edits, but after the Barack Obama/Bill Ayers/Weather Underground so-called "connection" story broke last week, it attracted more attention and a major rewrite and trimming. In the rewrite, the article was described as "overfootnoted", a term I have not heard before. The original citations were retained, but their "quote=" values were removed, with the single exception of a self-serving statement by Mark Rudd describing his Weather Underground comrades' nail bombs as "...crude mirrors of the anti-personnel weapons the U.S. was raining down on Indochina".
The rewriting editor and an anonymous IP from the same geographical area have accused me on the talk page and in edit summaries of copyright violation, as well as of "lacking judgement in a big way", and have given an uncivil recounting of my other alleged crimes against Wikipedia. I admit that I am not the world's best or most terse writer, and now that I have had time to cool down I will not deny that the rewrite generally improved the article. But I do need to know whether citing a news article's lead in a footnote constitutes copyright violation. -- CliffC ( talk) 19:35, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
I just deleted three or four long quotes out of media reports from footnotes. First off, quoting whole sentences, half paragraphs, violates copyright. Fair use means quoting sparingly: just a few quotes, and only a few words long each. Next, people who put long quotes in footnotes totally misunderstand how footnotes are used in academic literature generally, and particularly how they should be used in an encyclopedia. To the editors of this article who are putting masses of event detail in the footnotes, here's a question: why on Earth wouldn't this information belong in the body of the article? In a year and a half with Wikipedia, I have not seen your goofy practice in any other article. In fact, some of the material I deleted probably could be appropriately added to the body of the article (but the people who are misusing the footnotes in this way have tended to put in rambling, pointless detail, so beware of that). Besides that, the main purpose of footnotes is bibliography. Sometimes footnotes are an appropriate place for BRIEF clarifying notes, e.g., about terminology, where the alternative would be to put clarifications inside parentheses in the body of the text, which could cause an awkward read. In a monograph by an expert, the expert may choose to muse about some point and put the musing in a footnote to avoid distraction in the body of the article. But an encyclopedia is not a place for musing by an author. Hurmata ( talk) 01:50, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
In April 2008, the article had content like this:
* (text} An initial search turned up a 1916 37-mm. antitank shell.
* (footnote: source headline) 1916 Antitank Shell Is Found In Rubble of 'Village' Building"
* (footnote: source text) "A live 37 mm. antitank shell was found by the police last night in the ruins of a Greenwich Village townhouse that was wrecked last Friday by explosions and a fire."
So we see, the same information is given three times. Of the 12 distinct footnotes in the article, the bulk of them were like this. The kind of person who doesn't see the needlessness and inappropriateness of this redundancy is a kind of person who should find something else to do other than help write for Wikipedia. Hurmata ( talk) 09:56, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
The news report citation template includes fields for the reporter's name. But this is usually irrelevant information. Giving an author's name is about credit and about responsibility. In the case of a book, 99 percent of the time the content is the brainchild and the labor of the credited author. The publisher is just an agency that makes a business out of publishing and marketing the book. A news report is usually different: although writing is usually not equivalent to baking bread or producing paper clips, it is pretty routine. Some news writing is more literary than other news writing, but really, when the article is basically a report, the byline is sufficient credit. The key point is, we expect whoever is sent to gather "the facts" to come up with essentially the same set of names, dates, places, birth dates, who, what, when, where. Especially if they write several reports in the short space of a week or two (no single article may gather all the data available in that week, but four or six reports certainly should). At one extreme is a news report based on press releases or public records of types that everyone is familiar with and are easily accessed, so that very little journalistic skill is required to gather the story. At the other extreme are long investigative articles (involving tedious, expert gathering of data and intelligent detective work) and long analytical articles (which are about the reporter's educated opinion). Only in the latter cases should you include a journalist's name. Hurmata ( talk) 02:07, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
Why would a New York City journalist, or the fireman he interviewed, necessarily be an authority on antique ammunition when you have a collapsed building and corpses and a terrorist plot and serious issues to deal with? Why would you want them to be experts on trivia like that?
It's a minor error, or a misrepresentation, or even an adjective added for dramatic effect.
The round could be used in an antitank capacity, for sure, but against what?
You could simply shoot an existing round at any lightly armoured tank that comes along, but that does not make it an "antitank shell" per se.
Just because something appears in a newspaper does not make it gospel.
Varlaam (
talk)
18:02, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
Requesting any passing admin to move this article back to Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. It's the Weatherman bombing and deaths that make this building notable, not its street address or architectural style. -- CliffC ( talk) 16:54, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
Following my expansion, this article could use a photo of the current house on the site, which got a couple of grafs. It shouldn't be too hard to get. Daniel Case ( talk) 02:31, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
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