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Talk:Jennifer Cook O'Toole

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Unsourced Biographical Claims

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There are several biographical claims from the beginning of the Background section through citation 17 that are not supported by that particular citation. The cited interview only reflects that the article subject graduated Brown University with honors. It confirms none of the other information preceding it (and does not confirm the name of her sorority or her major).

As another example, the Background section claims that the article subject joined Mensa at age 7; an online search I conducted returned no reliable source for that claim (only various content aggregators and other low-quality sources that appear to have copied or paraphrased the information from Wikipedia). If anyone can properly source the Mensa claim (or any of the other unsourced claims in the Background section preceding citation 17), I would suggest doing so. Otherwise, I propose deleting all unsourced claims after a reasonable amount of time has passed.

On a related note, I have also tagged citations 18 and 19 as dead links. DoItFastDoItUrgent (talk) 06:18, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have now tagged citations 8, 9, 11, 12, 15 and 16 as dead links, as well. DoItFastDoItUrgent (talk) 22:45, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Since it's been nearly a month since I opened this discussion and no one has provided feedback or added any new citations to the Background section, I have deleted the unsourced claim that the article subject joined Mensa at age 7. If someone can find a book, a news interview, an episode of a TV show or any other source in which Cook explicitly made this claim, feel free to restore it (with a citation). However, until that is done, I don't feel it's appropriate to include in the article, especially considering the damage its unsourced inclusion on Wikipedia has done (namely, that multiple websites have uncritically repeated the claim, apparently with no additional sourcing or verification).
As a sincere piece of advice to anyone editing this article in the future, please do not forget to cite your work. Even if the information you're adding to the article is factually correct, if you don't cite it, you are creating extra work for other editors in the future (e.g., having to delete or revert your work or hunt down a citation for you) and compromising the quality of Wikipedia.
I'm leaving the other unsourced claims in the Background section for now (along with the citations-needed banner at the top of said section) only because I can't be bothered to hunt down a source for each and every unsourced claim made and the section would read extremely awkwardly if I deleted all the unsourced claims outright. Again, this highlights the importance of citing one's work when adding information to a Wikipedia article and not just expecting someone else to fill in the citational gaps. Remember, this is an encyclopedic work about a public figure, not a fan blog. Always back up a claim about a subject with a citation verifying it. DoItFastDoItUrgent (talk) 19:18, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]