User talk:Michael Jay Mjelde

Thanks for your work on Glory of the Seas (clipper)

Our rules against "spamming" your own books are in my opinion overly rigid. You are clearly an expert and your contributions to the article are all worthwhile. We need those rules because others have caused some messy disruption in the past. I will not revert your changes to this article. However, I still recommend that you cite some of those changes to your books. That's because of the peculiar way Wikipedia works. We have no way to know that you are who you say your are and we do not wish to know: that's also true of all of the 100,000 or so active editors we have each month. Therefore, we need everything to be cited to a reliable source. -Arch dude (talk) 15:06, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your specifying what is needed to improve the current writeup for GLORY OF THE SEAS. Up to yesterday, I have held off making any comments about the large number of errors in the previous listing written by well-meaning researchers but decided to address the major ones in this manner for the present, the reason being because otherwise, I would have to rewrite the entire writeup regarding this ship and include a large number of endnotes.

Please note that I have made a study of Donald McKay and his post-Civil War ships for over 60 years. Up to this point, three of my published books are centered around GLORY OF THE SEAS, and I have two more in the "works," one of which centers around the ship's final voyage in 1910. At a later date, I will address the note section of the current writeup as well as the current charts providing specifics around all of the Cape Horn voyage between the years 1870 and 1885 and provide more definitive references to not only published works but the primary source utilized. In that manner, the other 'referenced' works mentioned at the very end of the writeup can be moved into the primary account.

I foresee my eventually adding to the current Wikipedia writeup for Donald McKay because of the amount of primary source materials I have regarding McKay, and will eventually provide writeups for McKay-built vessels currently not mentioned in Wikipedia. Michael Jay Mjelde (talk) 16:17, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Again, thanks. Because we are crowdsourced and we have chosen to have no infrastructure for identifying our editors, we depend on policies that seem awkward for experts such as yourself. Since you intend to put a fair amount of work into this, I strongly urge you to familiarize yourself with our philosophy, policies, and guidelines. Start with WP:N, which tries to describe what we think an encyclopedia should be. It provides context that makes it easier to understand some of our policies. You will probably be particularly annoyed by policies on primary sources (WP:PRIMARY). You cannot use them directly at all here unless they are publicly accessible, and even then there are some restrictions. Fortunately, as an expert you know of reliable published secondary sources (books, newspapers, etc.) that themselves discuss those primary sources. Also fortunately, you are a published author. You can write books about McKay, and then use them here as sources. This may come close to violating our guidelines about referencing your own work, so please be careful. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on my talk page. -Arch dude (talk) 17:47, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate your comments. I can also see the value of not always referencing my own works on this subject so that in the future, when possiIble, I will refer to the 'initial' primary source (such as a newspaper citation) if possible. Unfortunately, many of my primary sources are items I have personally acquired regarding "Glory of the Seas" over a period of nearly 70 years (such as a letter written by Donald McKay in 1870 in which he hired a sailing master, and appointed himself as being captain of Glory of the Seas), unpublished correspondence or records from public agencies (various branches of the National Archives nationwide), or items currently archived in historical museums and not accessible by the general public unless you are willing to pay a researcher for access to the record. Michael Jay Mjelde (talk) 19:43, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Sadly, this means you will need to only use the secondary sources (i.e., your books) instead of the primary sources. To understand this better, think about what rules you would want Wikipedia to use in an article you did not write and in which you are not an expert, remembering that we do not have the resources to vett our editors. -Arch dude (talk) 21:36, 2 April 2024 (UTC)