User talk:Gedaali

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I have sent you a note about a page you started

Hello, Gedaali. Thank you for your work on Champion Métadier. User:Netherzone, while examining this page as a part of our page curation process, had the following comments:

Hello! Thank you for creating the article on an interesting French woman artist. The article can be improved in several ways: the Background section needs sourcing; a section for Collections in museums can be added to meet WP:NARTIST criteria #4, and additional sources fully independent of the person could be added. There is a LOT of content on her French Wikipedia page, if you are able to include some of that + associated citations, that would be great! Again, thanks for creating the article.

To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with {{Re|Netherzone}}. Please remember to sign your reply with ~~~~. (Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

Netherzone (talk) 21:22, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

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Finding sources

Hi @Teratix, by your sources in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Loudsauce, I'm really impressed with your ability to find these resources, because I tried searching with Google but didn't come up with anything. Would you be willing to teach me some of your search techniques? Gedaali (talk) 17:20, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Gedaali! Here are some of my tips:

• A lot of sources can be skipped over immediately merely by glancing at the snippet because they are affiliated with the subject, some random person's blog, social media sites, reprinted press releases, obviously irrelevant to the topic or part of an indiscriminate database. This is a bit of an acquired skill but once you get familiar with it you can skip over a lot of dead ends very quickly, and then it's a case of "just keep scrolling and clicking through the results until you see something potentially usable".
  • I'm not sure whether you're asking particularly about researching companies, but when you are you have to bear in mind you are usually operating in hostile epistemic territory. Companies are hugely incentivised to ensure they appear in the best possible light to their customers – many if not most articles you read will be there because of the company's overt or covert influence. Sources that appear to be independent will very often turn out to be regurgitated press releases or entirely reliant on information from the company's own personnel – and the source will often not disclose this.
• Consider the search terms you use. As a general rule, making your query more detailed will return results closer to what you're looking for, but sometimes will omit relevant results. I like to start by searching the subject's name if it's not too generic (in this case, "Loudsauce" is unique enough to be worth the time) as a first pass, then follow up with more specific terms (e.g. I used "loudsauce platform", "loudsauce crowdfund", and "loudsauce crowdsource").
  • However, sometimes the opposite is true and a more detailed query will show results that weren't in the initial query, e.g. in Loudsauce's case I only found the NYT and first Atlantic article upon using a more specific query. I don't know why this happens.
• If the subject's name is a compound term, you can use quotation marks to restrict your result to those that use that name verbatim. Again, this can make your results closer to what you're looking for but will sometimes omit relevant results. This applies even if the name is not written as a compound term: "loudsauce" got me better results than plain loudsauce because I don't get irrelevant results talking about "loud sauce".
• If the subject is most relevant or active within a restricted set of dates, limiting queries to those dates cuts down on the results to sift through.
  • For some reason, this can sometimes also surface relevant articles that don't show up in a less restricted search. I don't know why this happens.
• Don't just use the main search engine, e.g. depending on the subject it may be worthwhile checking Google Books, Google News and Google Scholar as well.
• If there's a particular useless site that overruns your results (perhaps a company website, press-release platform or social media), you can tell the search engine to exclude it with (e.g.) "-site:loudsauce.com".
  • If there's a specific site you think is likely to have a relevant article, you can also just use "site:loudsauce.com" and only articles from that site will show up. Again, sometimes this will surface articles that wouldn't show up on a broader search. I don't know why this happens.
• Running the same query on a different search engine (e.g. DuckDuckGo instead of Google) can sometimes surface an article disfavoured by the other's algorithm.
• Access to newspaper and web databases can be helpful for searching for and checking articles that are paywalled or no longer online. My regional library membership gives me access to a lot of these. There is also the The Wikipedia Library which you can use once you get a bit more experience on here.
• Sometimes the article itself will list promising links that have gone dead. archive.org will often preserve a copy.
  • If you're researching for an existing article, its current version may not list every promising source. Check the page history to see if the article has undergone major rewrites or purges; if so, check the older versions to see if any good sources were present – they may have ended up as collateral damage.

– Teratix ₵ 09:30, 15 April 2024 (UTC)