Talk:Charles Boit

A fact from Charles Boit appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 July 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Charles Boit's enamel group portrait of the family of Emperor Leopold I cracked after one of the Imperial princes accidentally sat down on it?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/July.

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Formatting of the article

I have reverted two different sets of edits by User:Falcon8765 in the last couple of days. I am sorry if Falcon8765 finds this upsetting in any way, but let me explain myself. Falcon8765's first edit added a tag at the top of the article requesting sectioning, but without explaining how that would be beneficial for this article. The other introduced ref-name formatting in footnotes referencing the same pages.

Sectioning is fine with longer articles or ones where several suptopics can be clearly distinguished. When I wrote this, I actually tried to add some subheaders, such as the places where he worked ("London", "Vienna", "London again" or something like that). In the end I decided that it just made the article look choppy and removed them.

There are articles on Boit in other reference works, such as the ODNB, the SBL, the Svenskt konstnärslexikon (a Swedish biographical dictionary of artists). None consider their article on Boit so long that it needs additional headers in the middle.

As for those ref-name thingies, they are never useful, as far as I am concerned. They just add unnecessary complexity to articles, all for the limited benefit of saving a few tiny lines in (what is in this case) an already smaller-sized, double-columned footnote section. --Hegvald (talk) 09:48, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify, the {{sections}} tag was placed during routine new page patrolling as the article is longer than most without sections but as you disagree it's fine. The reference changing is a WP:CITE general guideline so as to avoid huge lists of references as an article expands. It's not a particular issue now, but ref combining is done on most pages just for the sake of reducing redundancy. It doesn't particularly matter to me either way though. -Falcon8765 (talk) 12:28, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]