# Talk:County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York State

I've tagged the article with {{refimprove}} because the only linked reference does not confirm any details except that the final decision was 5:4 in favour to the Oneida Nation. Presumable the details of the case have been published somewhere, in which cas {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}}. {{cite newspaper}} or {{cite book}} should be used. Mjroots (talk) 17:09, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

You are confusing the existence of a reference with a link to an online reference. Online references are not required, but are a mere convenience. A cite to the United States Reports is a reference. Legal citations do not fit within the metes and bounds of the citation templates you have suggested, and thus their use would be a disimprovement. Savidan 17:15, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I've flagged this up at WP:LAW. How do you access your sources? Online or in printed form? Mjroots (talk) 17:28, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I use westlaw. Using the citations I have provided you could access these sources there, at LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law, google scholar, findlaw, etc. Plus, once the digital apocalypse strikes, you will be able to take those citations to the ruins of a local law library and retrieve the volume and page number of the U.S. Reports the old-fashioned way. Savidan 17:39, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I've just spotted the first reference has a link. If you were to convert all plain text refs to a linked web page, then there would be no problems with verification. So "470 U.S. 226 (1985)" would become 470 U.S. 226 (1985). I take it that all other pages are online. Mjroots (talk) 17:40, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
Your seem to be objecting to the use of all offline references generally. The fact that every letter of an article is not linked to another webpage is not a "problem[] with verification." In fact, external links outside of the external links sections of articles are disfavored. See WP:EL. One link is enough, where one source is cited more than once. Savidan 17:51, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I have no objection to offline refs, and use them myself. My objection is to the hard-to-understand format of refs, and the system employed here which does not allow the reader to easily verify the information where it seems possible that they could do so were an external link provided. Mjroots (talk) 18:03, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
It's not that I'm asking you to do something I'm not prepared to do myself. See Oxon Hoath and West Peckham Preceptory, where I have provided an online link to a book source from 1798. Mjroots (talk) 18:21, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
To me, there is something inherently perverse about the view that a citation that tells the reader the exact volume and the exact page number of the official reporter in which the cited material can be found is unverifiable, but conversely, a link any of the 1000s of fly-by-night web pages that copy and paste the public domain texts of decisions, often without incorporating page numbers, is verifiable. If you have no objection to the fact that a reference is offline, then you can only be objecting to the formatting of references. I don't think it is that hard to understand. The use of [volume #] [abbreviated source title] [page number] is common not only to legal citation, but to most scholarly systems of citations. If you wish to develop your own system of legal citation that makes more sense to you, please do so elsewhere, and submit it for public comment in a centralized discussion location, rather than singling out one of the tens of thousands of law articles on Wikipedia. Savidan 18:25, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Did you check the two articles I mentioned? I think you did not, otherwise you would have seen that the online web pages are scans of pages from the book, complete with page numbers and original spelling including the long s, rather than a typed copy of the original text. Mjroots (talk) 18:47, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
I have no idea what citation conventions make sense for those areas of content. For law, there are two value that are paramount: (1) the use of standardized legal citation style (i.e. the Bluebook for U.S. legal scholarship). Different citation systems seem intuitive to different people. It is apparent this this one is not intuitive to you. However, it is far preferable to use the one that is standard in court opinions, law reviews, legal news, and legal books, than to use some Wikipedia-specific template with no known community consensus behind it (in case it isn't obvious, I dislike the choices these templates make); (2) in the online context, neutrality between available systems of retrieving case opinions online. The citations I have provided can by copied and pasted into any of them. External links (most especially when included in every single footnote rather than once) show undue preference to one site. There are numerous ancillary problems to this, not the least of which are that Wikipedia is by design not capable of vouching for the accuracy of any given repository and that many of them contain ads or other monetization features that make linking to them inappropriate. An additional issue is that you seem to be assuming that Wikipedia is only an online encyclopedia. In fact, an important part of our mission is to enhance the reusability of our content in any medium, many of which are not online. The more external links outside of the external links sections of articles, the more hurdles have been created for the reuse of our content. Savidan 21:01, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

The citations I have provided can by copied and pasted into any of them
Ah!, you know that, but it isn't obvious to the lay-reader. Your arguement about favouring one source over any of the others can be covered quite simply, use each different source in turn, giving them roughly equal coverage. I thought that part of Wikipedia was making sources as widely available as possible when it is possible to do so. Anyway, in light of Rlevse's comments at DYK, I shall defer to him and withdraw my objection there. I'd ask you in return to consider my comments here, and maybe you could add the online links? Mjroots (talk) 07:25, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
I dislike repetition, but to recap, here's why the "equal coverage" doesn't work: external links outside of the EL section are disfavored (reusability, etc.), Wikipedia cannot vouch for the reliability of any of these sites (much less all of them!), and the values of these sites are antithetical enough to Wikipedia's such that they do not deserve to be plugged in each and every footnote.
As for the lay-reader, I suppose your argument has become: they won't understand the citation style, but at least they understand external links. The EL will teach them nothing about the citation style, but merely remind them that the case itself is being cited, something already quite obvious (just as obvious as the fact that the book itself is being cited in the section titled "plot"). I wonder what you find so helpful to the lay reader in the citation style for books or scholarly journals. Do you imagine that the city of publication will help them book a plane ticket to check it out for themselves? I suppose each footnote could say: "The case itself is being cited. Case opinions are published in reporters. This case is in reporter XXX. Reporters have volumes. This case is in volume XXX.  Volumes have pages. This case is on page XXX. Some cases span multiple pages. The specific content is on page XXX. Because cases are also in the public domain [this concept left unexplained], if you don't want to take my word for it, you can go to any of these sites, which appear to have copy-and-pasted the decision, but I'm not making any promises that the site is accurate or safe to visit." I'm not saying this is not useful information to communicate, but to over-communicate it in every footnote trades off with the usefulness of the article in other obvious ways.  My points about the reusability of Wikipedia and the reliability of these sites apply to this issue too, of course.
I'm apologize if you've found me unreasonable in our interactions, but you appear to have struck upon several of my pet peeves at once: (1) an obsession with external linking at every opportunity; (2) the view that if things aren't online they don't exist (or are "unverifiable"); (3) the view that every reference needs to be force-fed into a non-WYSIWYG template; and (4) the view that the [citation] style unanimous accepted in the [legal] real world must be crap, and should be replaced with something invented on Wikipedia that is meaningless everywhere else. If someone like me--an administrator, author of 5 featured articles, editing for 5 years--can be driven to distraction over this, it helps explain why more lawyers and legal academics do not contribute. Savidan 20:49, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

This review is transcluded from Talk:County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York State/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Michaelzeng7 (talk · contribs) 17:11, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Back to review another article! Please wait as I read the entire article to justify its good article nomination.


### Review
Sources Y
The "Background" section's first 2 paragraphs are unsourced and require citations.
Ref 39 contains a redlink that should be removed.
Pretty much all of the sources relate directly to the article topic. Consider adding third-party reliable sources.
Most of the article relies on one source: 470 US But this shouldn't be a problem when the one above is addressed.
Well-writtenY
The section Subsequent developments contains {{Main}} templates that link to articles that do not exist. These should be removed or fixed.
Broad in coverage Y
Neutral Y
I guess you can't really read this article without leaning to one side, but thats probably because the court ruled in its favor and I think it just depends on how you read it. So this shouldn't hold back GA status.
Stable Y
Images Y - There isn't much images to really correspond with this, so it passes in terms of quantity.
Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content. Y
images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions. Y
-Michaelzeng7 (talk - contribs) 01:59, 5 March 2012 (UTC)


### Comments
OK, I think thats it. I find this topic interesting. It's sourced amply, but most of them refer to primary sources. Any third party sources? It also seems to rely on 470 US all the time. Try and fix this, but I can understand it may be hard to fix, fix everything else and at least make attempts to third-party sources and that issue shouldn't be something that would hold back Good Article status. --Michaelzeng7 (talk - contribs) 02:25, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't agree that redlinks need to be removed. The redlinks are to notable topics, not the sort that WP:RED recommends removing. There is no requirement that good, or even featured, articles remove red links for aesthetic reasons. As for "470 US" that is the cite to the court's opinion itself. I do not agree that it is "primary source" within the sense that term is used in Wikipedia's policies (that would apply to party briefs and trial transcripts). Nor would it be an improvement to cite a quote or paraphrase of the court's opinion to some newspaper article or student's law review note. However, I will look to see if there is any additional analysis or commentary on the case that should be added before completely demurring on your third comment. Savidan 03:13, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
Very good point to WP:RED. I'll remove them from the list. Thanks for responding! -Michaelzeng7 (talk - contribs) 20:48, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
OK, yeah, I think this is good enough after some consideration. Good Article it shall be. -Michaelzeng7 (talk - contribs) 21:06, 6 March 2012 (UTC)