Talk:United Press International

1881?

The article now says that the United Press Association was founded in 1907. Yet, this wired news from 1881 is attributed to "United Press Association". The same text is also used in the New York Times article (without attribution).

• "Trial of the Czar's Assassins". Wanganui Herald. Vol. XV, no. 4132. United Press Association. 7 May 1881. p. 2.

-- Petri Krohn (talk) 17:51, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Unsourced material removed from article

United Press Associations

Newspaper publisher Edward W. Scripps (1854–1926) created the first chain of newspapers in the United States. After the Associated Press refused to sell its services to several of his papers, Scripps together with partner Milton A. McRae combined three regional news services (the Publisher's Press Association, Scripps McRae Press Association, and the Scripps News Association) into the United Press Associations, which began service on June 21, 1907. Scripps founded United Press on the principle that there should be no restrictions on who could buy news from a news service. William Randolph Hearst entered the fray in 1909 when he founded International News Service.

The AP was owned by its newspaper members, who could simply decline to serve the competition. Scripps had refused to become a member of AP, calling it a "monopoly, pure and simple" and declaring it was "impossible for any new paper to be started in any of the cities where there were AP members." (AP appeared in 1848, when six New York City newspapers formed a cooperative to gather and share telegraph news, but the name Associated Press did not come into general use until the 1860s.)

Scripps believed that there should be no restrictions on who could buy news from a news service and he made UP available to anyone, including his competitors. He later said: "I regard my life's greatest service to the people of this country to be the creation of the United Press."

Creating UPI

Frank Bartholomew, UPI's last reporter-president, took over in 1955, obsessed with bringing Hearst's International News Service (INS) into UP. He put the "I" in UPI on May 24, 1958, when UP and INS merged to become United Press International. Hearst, who owned King Features Syndicate, received a small share of the merged company. Lawyers on both sides worried about anti-trust problems if King competitor United Features Syndicate remained a part of the newly merged company, so it was made a separate Scripps company, which deprived UPI of a persuasive sales tool and the money generated by Charles M. Schulz' popular Peanuts and other comic strips.

The new UPI had 6,000 employees and 5,000 subscribers, 1,000 of them newspapers.

[End of unsourced material removed from article. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 03:32, 19 November 2010 (UTC) ]

Missing history section

"Undo" is looking like a crude tool here. I understand WP:BURDEN, but the difference from my previous restoration is that two further sources were made visible to the reader: (1) the Time article quoted at International_News_Service#UP_Merger ({{seealso}} often means that fuller citation can be found elsewhere in Wikipedia), (2) the external link[1]. It is not my normal practice to introduce this half-assed level of citation, but I think I can defend it here as first aid to a woefully deficient article (missing even the basic parameters of UP's foundation and 1958 merger to form UPI, which are grounded in a WP:RS at International News Service) that no one (myself included) seems to have the interest & energy to fix.

This is better than nothing, and WP:BURDEN does not require, for its satisfaction, that citations be expertly formatted and ideally presented. Once the two sources given above are in the article, it would seem appropriate that anything they support be retained. Anything else should be challenged specifically with {{cn}} so that editors have an opportunity within a reasonable time to support it. (I don't care if things like the quote templated in 2007 are deleted: that makes sense.)

In sum, the two citations my edit provides support much of the section, and the fact that they should be made better with neat inline refs is true, but an improvement project that does not justify blanking the section. The article in its present state is disfigured in a way that no strict Wikipedia policy requires: I regret editing to make it a mediocrely and partially cited section; again, that's not my usual practice, but it's better than nothing (and nothing is what the reader now learns about the most basic common-knowledge facts of UPI's history). Wareh (talk) 20:10, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

P.S. Note that in the removed section, above, the three longest and most substantive paragraph have no tags. I believe the time to add them (and wait some months for response) is now, retaining at least those paragraphs. Wareh (talk) 20:22, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

YES THEY DID, at the time they were first deleted (last month), before YOU restored this material without the tags. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 05:56, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

As to the rest:

1. Whilst a {{seealso}} may (or then again may not) be adequate to prevent (or at least delay) deletion of unsourced material, it is not an adequate basis for its reinclusion.
2. The webarchived page is WP:SPS, and therefore not an appropriate source for use about a third party (even if you had provided appropriate citations indicating what material it was purported to verify).
3. This is not attributing "to a reliable, published source in the form of an inline citation, and that the source directly support the material in question", so fails WP:V, and thus is as close to "nothing" as makes no difference.

Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 05:56, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Ok, the UPI version I found to restore lacked {{cn}} tags on the substantial paragraphs (I certainly did not edit them out), but I gather from your protest that they were subsequently introduced at some point in the history after the point at which I accessed that version. I regret the oversight. I think your dismissal of the {{seealso}}'s support for many of the essential points is cavalier; as I said before, such "further details" pointers often point our readers to more fully cited discussions, and I can't discover any basis in policy for saying such a form of reference fails to suffice here. But I don't want to waste time arguing. If I have time, I'll put the Time article in the references here and adapt the material at the INS article to the topic of UPI. If you have time, I hope you will.

WP:SPS "may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications"; I'm no expert in media history, but the author is pictured here producing copy for reliable third-party publications in the business about which he later compiled those facts. So this is not a flagrant fail.

In general, my shyness to remove so quickly may not be defensible by the letter of policy. I understand it's not a valid argument against you that this approach would destroy a lot of content I consider worthwhile for future editors and current readers. But I do think the {{seealso}} and the WP:SPS deserve better than abrupt dismissal. Wareh (talk) 14:24, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

(i) The first tag on the material I removed, and you added, was placed in {{cn}} was added in February 2007. Back then it did not even contain some of the material you restored. I am therefore at a loss to work out how you managed to find a version with all the restored material, without any tags. (ii) As to the see-also'd section -- it turned out to be a WP:COPYVIO. (iii) What evidence do you have that Lowry is an "established expert on the topic of the article"? Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 15:11, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

(i) All I can say is that I cut-and-pasted from a version somewhere in the history (I had to page through it at large intervals to find any treatment at all).

(ii) How can a 278-word quotation from a press account, when the quoted words are indicated as such and reference is given, be a WP:COPYVIO? This is fair use as practiced routinely in Wikipedia, blogs, newspaper websites themselves, etc. Is there a part of WP:COPYVIO I'm missing, which lays down something specific about extensive quotation, for example, the percentage of an article that crosses the line from appropriate citation to copyright infringement? Wareh (talk) 15:44, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

How? Very easily when it's a 425 word article -- that's 65% of the article that has been copied verbatim. See WP:NFC#Text : "Extensive quotation of copyrighted text is prohibited." Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 17:30, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not disputing that it was an extensive quote, and perhaps inappropriately so (certainly it was not digested the way it should have been for other reasons), but the fact remains that it would be useful to have some rough guidelines about what the "prohibited" degree of extensive quotation really is. These guidelines, by the way, should not be crude percentages; of course a 75-word "article" could be quoted 100% without any real risk of copyvio, while 0.1% of a 10,000-page work would be dubious. Our article fair use and published treatments of the question provide some illumination (under 300 words of Time would probably be ok, I believe), while acknowledging how blurry the lines really are. Wareh (talk) 18:26, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

(i) Extensive quoting is not merely 'inappropriate', but prohibited. (ii) Read Fair use#Amount and substantiality -- which does in fact talk percentages, not word count. This is the legal framework that Wikipedia is attempting to stay well away from the borders of. (iii) This would appear to be a completely unambiguous case of violation of WP:COPYVIO/WP:NFC#Text. If you want to discuss hypothetical details further, then take it to somewhere like WT:COPYVIO. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 05:55, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

It should be possible to write a good article on the UPI. There must be sources around. Borock (talk) 16:49, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Archiving

Archiving posts older than 180 days. After reviewing this page it seems like the correct amount of time. -KeptSouth (talk) 20:51, 15 March 2011 (UTC)