Draft talk:The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive

Latest comment: 5 months ago by Girth Summit in topic External links and editorialising
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CatMC17 - this looks like an interesting subject - thank you for properly declaring your conflict of interest with it. Please review the guidance on external links, and on editorialising.

You are linking to the BNDA website, and to a couple of pages on the CRRJ website, directly from the body of the article - that is not appropriate. A link to the BNDA may be appropriate in the infobox, if you write one, and the other links may be appropriate in an 'external links' section at the end of the article, but none of them should appear in the body of the text.

There are also some issues with your text with regards to inappropriate editorialising and promotional writing. As an example, there is the sentence These records, some hitherto lost in the annals of history or previously unreported, offer users the opportunity to discover how violence affected peoples’ lives, defined legal rights, and shaped contemporary politics. This is problematic - our articles aim to describe the subject, not to comment upon what the subject would 'give people the opportunity' of doing. You can describe what is in the archives, and you can describe what people use it for, but don't write about what it gives people the opportunity to do - that's promotional. Also, you write about CRRJ’s dedicated archivists, designers, developers and historians.... Now, I don't doubt that they are dedicated, but that's a value judgment, which we don't do in Wikipedia's voice. A simpler way of writing that sentence would just be to write something along the lines of "In November 2023, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project's archival team released a heat-map feature on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, showing the relative density of incidents of racialized violence between 1930 and 1954."

Finally, I have a slight concern that I'd like to run past you with regards to the origins of the text. Your text, while not entirely encyclopaedic, is very well-written - so much so that it looks like it has been copy/pasted from a piece of professional writing such as an existing website. The copyvio detection tool that I normally use is offline right now, but if this text is a match for something that has already been published, in print or online, then it will most likely be deleted as a copyright infringement - see WP:COPYVIO, for more on this. While there are some exceptions for text that is demonstrably in the public domain, the general rule is that everything you post here has to be completely written in your own original words.

Please let me know if you have any questions moving forwards. Girth Summit (blether) 08:40, 5 June 2024 (UTC)Reply