Tips and tricks

The unexpected rabbit hole of typo fixing in citations...

Today's column is a follow up to last issue's Tips and Tricks column on how to fix citations with automated tools. This time, automated tools are not enough, and so – inspired by last month's How to research an image – I'm going to take you down the rabbit hole of a "simple" typo fix, and how to research citations in general.

The culprit

WP:JCW/TYPO is a listing of citations containing likely typos. It is part of a family of "maintenance" listings covering various potential issues related to the |journal= parameters of citation templates. I try my best to clear these issues every time the compilation is updated, but there are very, very many issues and, well... people keep making mistakes. So even if I manage to clear them all, I only have to wait a bit to be presented with a slew of new issues.

On 13 August 2022, following the identification of The Women's Journal as a typo for The Woman's Journal, one entry got added to the listing:

Rank	Target	Entries (Citations, Articles)	Total Citations	Distinct Articles	Citations/article
41	Woman's Journal	The Women's Journal (1 in 1)	1	1	1.000

The compilation listed that this typo is found in |journal= once (the first 1 in "1 in 1"), in one article (the second 1 in "1 in 1"). This article is linked for convenience: Grace Hazen, who was an American jewelry designer. Prior to fixing, the problem citation was

Foster, Isabel (October 1925). "She Speaks in Gold". The Women's Journal. X (7): 16, 39.

used to back up the claim that Hanzer studied at the Pratt Institute for a while.

Simple fix right? Simply change The Women's Journal for The Woman's Journal and call it a day!

Wrong.

Digging deeper

Digging up citations is messy work.

Naively thinking I had fixed the typo, I wanted to add a link to a free version of the article. I tried a few Google searches:

The first three search came empty at the time of writing (save for the Hanzer article), but the fourth one found something. A Google Books entry about the supposed 10th volume of The Woman's Journal. Sadly, there is little publicly available text, but it is searchable in the "From inside the book" box. I figured I wouldn't have much luck but wanted to at least confirm that the title of the article, pages, and author were right, so I simply searched for Foster... no luck. But then I noticed something. While Google Books listed this as The Woman's Journal, Volume 10, much like I had expected after the simple typo fix, the image of the cover was rather blurry. And I couldn't make out The Woman's Journal, but rather The Woman's C[blurry mess] or The Woman's G[blurry mess]. Could this typo be reflective of a bigger error? Is a different publication meant? The Women's Gazette, maybe?

Those that already followed the link to The Woman's Journal may already know what the answer is. In 1925, the date of the article "She Speaks in Gold" was supposedly printed, the title of the publication was not The Woman's Journal, but rather The Woman Citizen.

Hope?

Digging deeper...er

Let's search for "The Woman Citizen" volume 10 this time. This is significantly more promising than all our previous searches. The first result is an unrelated publication on Amazon. But the second result? A full issue of The Woman Citizen on the Internet Archive. It's the wrong issue, but of the correct volume. Could other issues be archived? Scrolling down to the metadata section reveals a semi-obscure "pub_womans-journal" link, which can be understood as machine-like shorthand for "publication: woman's journal" or similar. Following the link brings us to a collection of microfilms for the years 1917 to 1931. We are in luck, being interested in the year 1925. Filtering by year easily lets us find the 7th issue.

Jackpot!

I will note here that the Internet Archive is a phenomenal resource for old magazines and newspapers, not just archived webpages. They often have entire back catalogues freely available, which can be searched for specific pieces of text. You can often find the article you are looking for just based on keywords and the year of publication, or by searching the author's name.

The ultimate fix

Just like the initial citation indicated, our article is indeed on page 16, continued on page 39, but it also continues until page 40. Now, equipped with the proper title, full page range, and a link... we can perform the ultimate fix!

Foster, Isabel (October 1925). "She Speaks in Gold". The Woman Citizen. 10 (7): 16, 39–40.

A hidden beauty is now on display for everyone to enjoy: a very convenient free link, to an almost 97 year old article, from a defunct publication, verifying that Ms. Hazen had indeed studied at the Pratt Institute for 6 months. Readers and librarians everywhere rejoiced, not having to do this digital excavation work themselves.

Phew!

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The ultimate fix? Not quite! We're 98% there at the end of this article, but what if our brave librarian reader wants to see more about this magazine? What if they've seen another article in The Woman Citizen, but the cover looked different—was it even the same magazine? As this article notes, names are transitory, and are often not unique; "The Woman Citizen" seems pretty singular, but there's a lot of magazines out there with the same name from different time periods or countries, since a name is just an advertisement in its own market and therefore has no need to be convenient for encyclopedias. How then to tell precisely what magazine it is? Well, global librarians have solved this issue for us (multiple times, actually): add an id number. Magazines have two options: the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), overseen by the International Standards Organization, and the OCLC number, managed by an American non-profit that also maintains the Dewey Decimal system nowadays. ISSN is usually more common for magazines, but either uniquely identifies a magazine- in our case, courtesy of OCLC's WorldCat, we can see that the magazine's ISSN is 1937-142X, and its OCLC number is 2395192. Slap either of these on the citation with |issn=1937-142X and/or |oclc=2395192, and then we're at the ultimate fix. --Pres N 00:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's really if you believe ISSNs and OCLCs have value in citations. And I personally don't. If you follow them, you won't find the article you're looking for. Others disagree, but I find them to be clutter at best and Worldcat to be a very low quality database in general (with multiple redundant OCLCs for the same publication each taking you to variations of metadata). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:09, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I for one want all of that high-quality metadata in one place, however cumbersome. Otherwise we're just lead to a disambiguation function in... another place... Which is a whole other layer of cumbersome. This may be a philosophical difference, but citations should be one-stop shopping. The fuller, the better. kencf0618 (talk) 12:47, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Fun article! Every once in a while I sort of try to explain to someone what I was so engrossed in for an hour or 2 or 6, but it's hard to express. Headbomb, thanks! --Doncram (talk) 00:38, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Much like "How to research an image," this was a joy to read! Feels good to see a bit of research play out so well. I feel like I've been burned too frequently, not being able to trace back a source at all. Just makes it feel even better to see a success story :) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 11:34, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Parenthetically, -, –, —, and ― each serve distinct functions –but that way madness lies. Hence I tend my own garden. (Which functions, I leave as an exercise for the reader.) kencf0618 (talk) 12:43, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what endashes and hyphens and other things have to do with anything here... ? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:56, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This is among the best articles I've read in The Signpost. Very nicely done. Jeffrey Beall (talk) 21:24, 2 September 2022 (UTC).[reply]
A very nice read. It misdirected me a little because a lot of times we hear a story about someone tracing back an obscure citation on a random page, the conclusion is that the article is a hoax. But I think this shows just how difficult it is to discover a hoax: here, it really looked like the citation couldn't exist for a while, but it did. Disproving the existence of something beyond reasonable doubt is inordinately complicated. We say that readers should be able to verify any fact in Wikipedia themselves, but things are often not so simple. — Bilorv (talk) 11:18, 4 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
What a story! This kind of trial and error until success is what I feel the website is all about 🙂 Johnson524 (Talk!) 20:10, 6 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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