Talk:Forensic history

Neutrality clean-up tag and citation issues

Editor Thilio added a neutrality clean-up tag with the comment that "... the article currently has sections that read like advocacy or promotional material and lacks sufficient inline citations". However, I am not sure exactly which parts of the article are being referred to by this comment. While editor Dautzenlein has since added a section with some "References", that I have attempted to clean up, but I wonder if these references are better placed in a section called "Further reading". What I think is really needed here are inline citations, not just those that use ref tags but also a full citation template for each reference or citation as this gives a more consistent format. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 01:04, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I also note that some of the references also use bare URLs which I have tagged. I think this issue can be resolved by using a citation template, which provides for placing URLs under the title of the citation text as a hyperlink. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 01:48, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Article clean-up issues

This article has the feel of some sort of assignment about it, though I haven't used that as a reason for clean-up. While the first paragraph of the article makes a passable lead section, I think the rest of the article needs additional sections to demarcate some definitions and quotations about Forensic Historical Research from what the topic actually is about. Judging by the WikiProjects added to this article, I am sure that other editors are under the impression that this topic refers to the investigation of historic crimes, which I don't think is the intent of this article at all. Rather it is a method of historical research that mostly examines the primary documentary sources and other physical evidence still available to document history and form an opinion of what happened. That insight is not conveyed by the way the article has been written and it took me some time and re-reading to come to that conclusion. Hopefully, dividing the article into sections will make this more obvious. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 01:45, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Title and capitalization

@Dautzenlein: Wikipedia article titles are normally written in sentence case, unless the words in the title represent a proper name. See the guideline Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) for more information. While the titles of various citations in this article have been capitalized in title case, Wikipedia's Manual of Style indicates that both article titles and section headings should be in sentence case; that is capitalise the first letter but otherwise use lower case for titles and section headings. I cannot find clear evidence that Forensic Historical Research and Analysis is a proper name or even a defined term. However, in 2019, MIT offered a course named "Forensic History" that said:

"... Forensic history marries the tools of scientists to the research agenda of historians to solve mysteries buried in the past. This course serves as a workshop to explore forensic history (a developing discipline) by following new pathways to research and write history in the 21st century.

" For centuries, historians have largely worked in archives and libraries using texts as the main catalyst to understand the past. This method has its limitations. Historians could only reach people who left behind a written record. What about people who were illiterate or too poor to preserve a record of their existence? Also missing from traditional historical method was the history of animals, plants and any other object that did not speak the way humans do. This shortcoming has become increasingly apparent as we realize in new ways the interconnected qualities of humans with the environment around them.

" This course will serves as a workshop where students explore new science and technologies to open wormholes into a past which had long been considered inaccessible. Students will investigate how researchers deploy forensic technologies to confirm or dispute controversial events in history. Drawing on a large palette of techniques—from, for example, science on climate change, geology, molecular biology, proteomics, DNA testing, carbon dating to big data analysis— ... to understand histories of previous centuries."

To me, this article is describing "forensic history", (which does not currently exist as a Wikipedia article) and the usage of lower case for that term in the above quote indicates the title should not be capitalized as it is not a proper name. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 08:54, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Principles of Archaeology

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2026 and 6 May 2026. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): UseR2k6 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: MasonPUA.

— Assignment last updated by Hollyneumann (talk) 04:24, 7 March 2026 (UTC)