Davekerrarch

Stratford ME Church

Thanks for your note!

First off, on the community/congregational history, I'm confident that the account is accurate. Many of the pre-1880 elements also appear in Perrin's History of Delaware County and Ohio (1880), and I see no disagreements between the sources. I think we're safe in retaining the elements that don't appear in Perrin. We're also safe in retaining the first part of the "Architecture" section, as it comes not from Davies' documentation but from [1], both the photo and the textual elements.

The real substance of your question is related to our policies on reliable sources (more specifically) and verifiability (more generally), because information in articles must come from published reliable sources. Our own original research isn't proper to include in articles, so changing information based on your own survey isn't appropriate. Is there a chance that your firm's work will be published by OHC or the county historical society, or in some reliable periodical? For many purposes, newspapers aren't reliable, but if the Gazette ran a feature story about this project and included a description of the architectural elements, that would be workable; the reporter's there, looking at the elements and talking with your people, so presumably they'd get it right or you'd complain to the editor. However, if the results haven't yet been published, we have to wait until they are, and if they're not published at all, we can't include the results.

Finally, there's a big difference between changing sourced information (without a different source to back it up) and omitting it. If we merely rewrote the "Architecture" section, it would look like the information we wrote came from the source that's actually erroneously saying something different. However, there's no such problem with omitting the information — if the thickness of the walls isn't mentioned, or the roof supports aren't mentioned, or anything like that, the article won't suffer, and we've not misrepresented the source: we've simply chosen certain elements that we deemed most important to include, and it's not wrong to exclude elements if we believe they're in error. Therefore, I'd suggest that you list the parts that are wrong (is it merely the wall thickness, or is something else also problematic?), and I'll remove them. It's better that I remove them, because technically you're covered by our conflict of interest policy, as you're the owner.

Any other questions? Let me know and I'll do my best to help. Nyttend (talk) 02:09, 22 May 2017 (UTC)