In response to the proposed removal of suggestions provided for prospective editors of articles on historical cameras, the following clarification has been compiled:
It would be a great loss to Wikipedia if potential editors were not offered advice on how to edit articles. This does not limit their opportunity to contribute, but rather to do so in an efficient and accurate fashion. Every field within knowledge has its own terminology and way of expressing information. This may not always reflect the generally excepted way, but non the less be the way practised in a specialised field, possibly limited to a certain period of time in history. Any conflict with existing established Wikipedia guidance demonstrate the need for specialised guidelines as required. Please note that the guidelines here in question do not concern the article language, but the style of the source information of the subject in hand. The engravings on cameras or lenses, and the printed contemporary literature are such examples.
It is no doubt such guidelines should exist and be part of Wikipedia guidelines. However, in order to be effective and reach the casual editor it must be concise, short and above all easily discovered. Hence, each article where special terminology is useful should be tagged accordingly.
Several factors have made this proposal necessary:
The short list of 'Historical camera terms' provided initially, reflected some of these considerations. With respect Jan von Erpecom 12:22, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
A Stub article is defined in the WikiProject article quality grading scheme as:
BTW: The Leica Standard article is tagged as a STUB-Class article on the Quality Scale.
I note with interest your suggestions above about how editors should edit and add to articles about Cameras, however, this is not agreed and adopted by consensus of Wikipedia editors and I suspect that some, including myself, might well demur from some of what you propose. However, with regard to the Periflex article ( and I speak as a Periflex owner), I consciously removed all the "How to do" text as Wikipedia guidance is clearly against the inclusion of such material. I also altered the tense to the past because these cameras were made in the past and not the present. I also removed material that is not distinguishing of a Periflex or particular to the brand. Thus almost all cameras of that age had a rewind knob or lever and a shutter release button and therefore require no mention unless they are both special and unusual. I have no disagreement with your intent but I am also a believer in succinct articles that include pertinent information and do not read as if they were camera manuals. Regards Velella Velella Talk 16:38, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
Hallo Jan von Erpecom,
I can see at once that you are highly knowledgeable about historic cameras, and that you have taken great care to be accurate and clear in articles such as Contarex.
However, in the same manner as Velella's comment above, there are some issues about the construction of Contarex that I believe need attention. I hope you won't mind if I'm very brief about them.
1) The lead section should summarize the rest of the article, without adding claims of its own. (Therefore, it generally does not need to be cited.) However the lead in Contarex talks about Zeiss Ikon - not the subject of the article - and talks about other cameras. This may be good for background but is certainly not what should be in a lead ( WP:LEAD).
2) Good sources are named in references 1..5, but these are not used in most of the body of the article, which remains uncited ( WP:V).
3) Articles are supposed to avoid describing instructions ( WP:HOWTO), but a substantial part of the article is very close to being instructional.
4) The article style is largely that of an expert explaining a complex topic, as when a skilled engineer gives a technical but "chatty" talk: in short, it feels like 'original research' ( WP:OR). It feels very far from the usual tone of the encyclopedia, where each fact is neutrally stated ( WP:NPOV), and supported by a citation.
I believe these issues apply also to other articles such as Nikon F, Exacta, Kine Exacta, and no doubt many others, so I suspect this list of issues will seem somewhat unwelcome, for which I apologize. However, given the accumulation of Wikipedia policies in recent years, it is probably appropriate to consider them now. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 20:07, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
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