Talk:Norman Stevenson

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Proposal to expand stub / questions about Wikipedia-compliant sources

Hallo fellow Wikipedians,

I would like to expand this stub article on Norman Lang Stevenson (henceforward NLS) – chiefly regarding his cricket career for which he was well-known in Scotland. As his grandson, this caught my eye as an omission to be rectified.

I’d like to add the following:

• NLS’ very lengthy, successful captaincy of Edinburgh’s Carlton Cricket Club (retiring aged 73) and brief examples of Carlton win-records during his captaincy. Plus the appraisal by The Encyclopedia of Scottish Cricket that he was probably better as a captain than as a player.

• A content summary of his 1946 Scottish cricket history book, Play, a mix of history, match records and NLS personal memoirs, which in 2020 is still being referenced as a history source book.

• Scores at the Scotland versus Germany and Scotland versus England hockey matches at the 1908 Olympics, which made him a bronze medallist.

• Signpost readers towards details about his cricket career on the Carlton website and in his book.

Please can I hear views about what would be Wikipedia-approvable sources, noting the following issues.

WikiDan61 has pointed out the need for independent evidence that NLS was ‘notable’ as a cricketer and for how his book is regarded by others in the cricket world.

Re a test for notability, Wikipedia’s Cricket in Scotland article states (‘Further Reading’ para) that The Encyclopedia of Scottish Cricket (1999) by sports writer David W. Potter is “the major work on the subject”. Although The Encyclopedia is primarily focused on clubs, it does give some personal entries and NLS qualifies for one of these. His 220 word personal entry (pp 179-180) starts: “one of the great characters of Scottish cricket” and he is also mentioned in at least 3 other articles in The Encyclopedia. Carlton Cricket Club gets a substantial entry as an important Scottish club (pp.28-29).

NLS’ 1946 book Play is named the “best” of various histories of Carlton by The Encyclopedia (p.29), which calls NLS “a great writer on the game”(p.180). Re this 1946 book’s continued standing as a history source, it is cited 14 times, more than any other source, in a new 2020 book on Scottish cricket, The Secret Game: Tales of Scottish Cricket, by Jake Perry, a writer for Cricket Scotland (see pp. 169-170 in paperback online free sample on Amazon) and it features on this book’s “most highly recommended” list (p. 175).

Two of the sources which I would like to use for expanding the NLS article seem clearly Wikipedia-compliant: The Encyclopedia of Scottish Cricket and the official report from the 1908 Olympics. Questions:

1. Can the material about NLS on Carlton Cricket Club’s website be counted an acceptable secondary source? I would argue that it can. The creation of these webpages took place a long time after NLS’ 1967 death, has used a varied mix of sources and must have been guided by some sort of selective editorial process. Its primary audience includes well-informed sporting circles in Scotland. (Website is archived by British Library.)

2. What considerations should govern use of information from Play? In Wikipedia terms it seems a mix of primary and secondary sources. The parts of the book which cover NLS’ own 50 year cricket era repeatedly feature score tables and verbatim match reports from newspapers coupled with a mix of retrospective NLS commentary on these plus sometimes extra information about the particular event. Relevant parts of Wikipedia’s ‘Reliable sources’ article convey to me that for certain purposes it would be an acceptable source. Carlwark (talk) 15:10, 13 July 2020 (UTC)