Talk:Siobhán Phelan

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Citations

The first paragraph of the "Legal career" section has eight inline citations. One good source is normally sufficient. I suppose that if sources were not stellar, or otherwise not really great for a BLP, three sources "might" be acceptable if a result of consensus. However, too many is "citation clutter". See: This page in a nutshell: When citing material in an article, it is better to cite a couple of great sources than a stack of decent or sub-par ones.

Citation overkill is usually the result of edit warring but the bottom line is that eight is far too many. -- Otr500 (talk) 09:17, 24 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Otr500, I don't think that policy is relevant here. The citations are not in conflict with each and are not sub-par sources (they are among the most reliable news sources for Ireland). Each one is referring to a different aspect of her practice while a barrister.

However, I have used Template:Multiref2 to combine the eight footnotes into single footnote. ZL10 (talk) 15:27, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, while I disagree with your synopsis I totally agree with the solution, and I surmise you mean "in this case". I have only been around "a minute" and anyone can make mistakes. I had a friend that commented once that he knew a person that did not make mistakes. RIP was at the top of his headstone.

I did not look at the citations, just the lengthy number, so I will take your word for it. It might seem noble if I stated I was assuming good faith but I actually did not consider the reliability or I would have reviewed the sources to see if WP:REFBOMB was applicable. This "is" a fairly new Start-class article with only six editors. On occasion, I just leave comments to see if there are active editors.

Sometimes policies and guidelines are a little vague so information pages are created, Sometimes, we find essays that act as subject information pages, with a sizable number of active editors, that carries some authority as consensus. I had someone (a fairly long time ago) argue that essays carry no authority. At that time I pointed to the essay (now an "explanatory essay") WP:NOTHERE. It actually carries a warning "...editors whose personal agendas and actions appear to conflict with its purpose risk having their editing privileges removed", and I have seen editors sanctioned to include being blocked or banned. So much for that editor's theory.

If there are multiple citations following a sentence or paragraph that has several different "aspects", it would seem a logical choice to list each one with an independent citation separated by a comma.

I was referring to, the "essay on the Verifiability policy and the Citing Sources guideline, Wikipedia:Citation overkill that actually produces the following in a pop-up menu:

Wikipedia policy requires all content within articles to be verifiable. While adding inline citations is helpful, adding too many can cause citation clutter, making articles look untidy in read mode and difficult to navigate in markup edit mode. If a page features citations that are mirror pages of others, or which simply parrot the other sources, they contribute nothing to the article's reliability and are detrimental to its readability.

The first two sentences do not use any exceptions or qualifiers such as "decent or sub-par ones". I have been here well over ten years (WOW!) and began to work in the appendices area shortly thereafter, as well as at AFD. In many instances, the "essay" I referred to has been used to mean "too many". At any rate #1)- I had what I saw as an issue and #2)- you provided a very good solution in a very short timeline. Again: Thank you, –– Otr500 (talk) 00:35, 26 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]