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My specialty is paleontology, not archeology, so I don't know the detailed circumstances in this field, but why do the references on this page only include news websites and not papers? There are circumstances as to why I am concerned about this. Editor User:Lamminiaz, who edited this page until June, added a finding after news article to this page. That is about fossil finding of Cooyoo, specimen named "Wandah".[1] Although this news states tag of "Archaeology" and mentions "archeologist", it is surely mistake to paleontology, which is confused so many times. So that editor found that news and added that as finding in this February, when the news was published. But more problematic about that is, actual finding of that fossil is 2011.[2] In the end, the content related to this was deleted because it did not fit the page, but can we really say that other news items do not have similar time lags? Current page still have so many things that "finding date" and news article dates are same. At the very least, there must be a time lag between when an archaeological thing is discovered and when it is studied or reported on the news. I feel that it is extremely problematic that the content is written as if it was discovered on the day the news was published. First of all, I feel that there is no need to write down specific dates, and it would be less confusing to just display the discovered contents along with the sources. Also, it would be better to focus on the content researched in papers rather than news. Look at 2023 in paleontology page for good example. Ta-tea-two-te-to (talk) 12:56, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The simple answer is that news stories are easy to access and gain attention. For a list so recent, papers are unlikely to be available yet. For example, the most recent volume of Medieval Archaeology was published in December and contains fieldwork highlights from 2022. Ideally, as lists like this age they acquire more journal articles as sources, though that may not be terribly realistic.
Journal articles are important sources for articles like this because they will be more detailed and up-to-date than news stories, and the news stories don't necessarily accurately reflect the events.
I agree that it is all too easy for the announcement of a find to become the point at which it was discovered without careful wording. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:33, 21 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
