Talk:Norfolk Regional Center

List-defined references

I am contemplating a major revision of this article, probably with the addition of a number of citations. To make that easier, I'd like to change it over to list-defined references (see WP:LDR). Would there be any objection from previous editors to my doing so? Ammodramus (talk) 00:47, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Major revisions

I have made major revisions to this article. In fact, I've rewritten it completely, with little or no reference to the earlier versions.

This might be seen as taking WP:BOLD to an extreme; indeed, to the extent of discourtesy to my fellow editors, who've put time and effort into writing the earlier versions that I've deleted and overwritten. I apologize for this seeming want of courtesy, but I believe that it's justified in this situation. The previous version of the article was seriously flawed, and only a radical measure could fix it.

The earlier version cited three sources. One of these was the "Haunted Places in Nebraska" website. A reading of this page convinces me that there's no kind of peer review involved: you give them your e-mail address, and then you can post your ghost story. This leads me to reject that source on grounds of both WP:V and WP:FRINGE.

The second source in the original was the "Norfolk State Hospital" page at asylumprojects.org. According to the project page, it is "[a] historic asylum wiki anyone can edit". I think we need to reject it under WP:V, just as we can't cite Wikipedia pages. There are no citations in the Norfolk State Hospital article, so we can't follow them up. I believe that it's largely based on a misreading of the third source in our original article—

The third source in our original article is this study, compiled by a hatful of University of Vermont students. The page contains exactly one sentence about the Norfolk Regional Center. However, it's poorly written, and a reader who doesn't know Nebraska could easily conclude that some of the things written about other Nebraska institutions are about the one in Norfolk.

The original article also contains some unsourced and highly debatable statements; note this diff. Nothing in any of the sources that I consulted, or in the three sources in the original article, supports the passage that begins "Life in the asylum was rough."

I have rewritten the article completely, with much more emphasis on history and much less on the sensational (and unsourced). I did a great deal of my research in the Norfolk, Nebraska library, where I had access to local histories, several of which I've cited.

--Ammodramus (talk) 03:42, 8 October 2010 (UTC)