Talk:Khalili Collection of Kimono

Publishing

Hi, as the Wikimedian In Residence of the Khalili Collections, I have created this draft on paid time. There is soon to be a bulk upload of images from the collection which will provide further images for this article. I would like an uninvolved editor to move this draft into article space and of course I am receptive to any feedback about quality or neutrality of the draft. Thanks in advance for any help, MartinPoulter (talk) 14:46, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi Martin, and thank you for your query. The edit request process is set aside for articles which are already active as approved articles. The editors over at articles for creation are in charge of all draft space articles. If articles were like children, and the question was which doctor takes care of which child, you could think of the editors who monitor AFC as the obstetricians — responsible for articles before they are born (drafts) — and the pediatrician as the editors monitoring edit requests, responsible for articles after they're born. Simply submit the draft through AFC in order to announce that your article is ready for review. Thank you! Regards,  Spintendo  15:54, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the colourful analogy! MartinPoulter (talk) 16:57, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Published. Absolutely no need to delay this in quagmire that is AfC; any person, policy or process that stops or delays such a wonderful article being available is not working in the best interests of the project, nor our audience. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:50, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Recent changes

@Ineffablebookkeeper: Big thanks for all the improvements you've made to this article. Just a few points where we need to be careful and a couple of questions:

• "Collection" needs to be capitalised consistently; Khalili Collection is a proper noun but "the collection" isn't so doesn't take a capital. I've fixed this.
• There's no point making {{main}} links to pages that don't exist. I've removed these and they can be added when the target articles exist.
• Do the gallery images need to be so big? On small screens they take up more than a screenful and disrupt the flow of the text. Is there some established practice or guideline you're basing the choice on?
• In one of your cites (about the meaning of "kimono") you've cited page 39 of a book, but the relevant statement is on page 20. Please take care with page numbers.
• On the same theme, the original citation saying that kimono included visual puns (footnote 13 in this version) specified page 22. You've changed the citation to remove the page number. Book citations need page numbers. Please don't remove this kind of information from the article.
• You've changed format for the book citations, which I'm neutral about: the old format was okay and the present format is okay. I have a mild preference for not cluttering body text with page numbers but keeping them within citations so they are seen when the user requests them. Could you set out your reasoning for why it was important to do this change? It seems like a lot of work. I'm used to using {{sfn}} and just want to understand why you thought the change was necessary. From your edit summary it seems like you thought this was important to do. MartinPoulter (talk) 11:06, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

• P.S. Can you explain why Azuchi-Momoyama period was enclosed in a language tag but Heian period was not? Since "period" isn't a Japanese word, enclosing it in a language tag seems incorrect.
• Also, you got the title of the Anna Jackson book (the article's main source) incorrect. Please let's use the correct title as well as the page for book citations.
• Looking further, for the first sentence under the Meji era section, you've credited Anna Jackson, but the original citation named Christine Guth, the author of the cited text. Can you explain your thinking in changing the author attribution?
• In the section headed Kimono, you've deleted some text that was sourced to reliable sources and replaced it with unsourced text. The new text gives interesting additional information, but given that you've deleted cited information and added uncited information, this isn't, in Wikipedia terms, an improvement.
• I'd also be interested to see the explanation for why you replaced ja-latn language tags with ja language tags. Template:Lang#Indicating_writing_script says that suffixes should be used to indicate the script a language is in when it's not the default, and Latin script is obviously not the default for Japanese. I'll fix this myself, but if there's a good reason for the change I'll put it back. MartinPoulter (talk) 13:29, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Hi - Thanks for your feedback. If it's alright, I'll go through things one by one:

• 'the Collection' seemed to just be the right use of English at the time, but apologies if it wasn't
• I also wasn't aware that WP:REDDEAL didn't apply to {{main}} links, so apologies for that as well
• The gallery images don't need to be as large if you feel they're unnecessary; please change them as you wish
• This was an error brought in by me copy-pasting my source for the meaning of kimono on the kimono article - though the Google Books link is incorrect, the page number still formats as [9]:20. I'll correct the URL so it links to the right page
• I'm not removing page numbers for no reason; I have to emphasise that I am not aiming at sloppy and inconsiderate editing here. The formatting I've used for the citations - and the reason I changed them - was so that instead of the slew of numbered references of the same book formatted in this version, the citations used for that one book format as something like 12.^a b c d.. and so on. I've had this issue with the kimono article; a lot of the article rests on one book, Kimono by Liza Dalby, but calls different page numbers each time. I haven't found a way to reference one book with different page numbers every single time, including the very first instance of that reference, meaning that the first instance of a book that's cited a number of times on any given article - and this isn't an elegant or even really good solution, but it truly is the only one I found that neatened citations as best as possible - it has to be referenced without a page number.
• You mention a preference for no page numbers within the main text; I've got a strong preference to neaten up the References section. It wasn't something I even really thought was better at first, but I've found that it's just streamlined the editing process and the end result. I didn't think a chunk of references for one book seemed particularly...well, good. I wouldn't have called that good formatting, honestly. I really wouldn't have.
• Azuchi-Momoyama is in a language tag because it doesn't crop up on Merriam-Webster; Heian isn't because it does. This first came up for me when I was re-writing the kimono#history section elsewhere; I wasn't sure how many terms needed the lang tag, because I knew some would be encoded for screenreaders already and some wouldn't. Looking through MOS:FOREIGNITALIC, I saw the advice of "If looking for a good rule of thumb, do not italicize words that appear in Merriam-Webster Online" - so I went with that. I really was just following whatever advice there was on-wiki.
• Please correct the book title, by all means - I have to say the formatting of a book with essays within it by a number of different authors puzzled me.
• I don't honestly remember changing the author attribution; this seems like another small fix. The article's long and it's stuffed with references, no one pass re-write of any article is gonna be perfect from the off.
• Some information was just extraneous - it really was going into too much detail. The history of kimono is interesting; but this article is about a collection of kimono, and the information for the history of the kimono should be placed elsewhere. I've saved a paragraph I removed to put back into the Kimono article - rest assured things I put in that seem uncited are citable. I would say "I'll go back and add in those extra citations", but it seems you've added a lot of extra edits on top of the big one I already did, so I no longer know what exactly you're talking about when it comes to what's cited and what's not. If you can prove examples, I'll be happy to add them in.
• I've been using the ja lang tag throughout all my work on Wikipedia - this is based solidly on the advice seen on the template for lang tags. It seemed that shorter tags were favoured, so that's what I've been using. I've never had an issue with them, but apologies if I've fucked it up.

I have to say - I'm not aiming for sloppy editing here. I literally write about, talk about and retail kimono for a living; I've been involved in the kimono community since I was 14. If I've added something that seems uncited - it is citable, but this re-write took roughly three days for me to actually finish. I am not wandering in unannounced and changing things for no reason - I know I have roughly 500 edits only, and that I've been on Wikipedia for less than 2 years, but all I can say is that I know what I'm on about. I'm not being sloppy, and I have to say also that a lot of the articles on traditional culture are in way more of a state than this. It's not an excuse for shit edits if you think I've done shit edits, but it's something to keep in mind. --Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) 17:01, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

@MartinPoulter and Ineffablebookkeeper: Having discussed this in the unofficial Wikipedia discord and looked at the citations myself, I have suggestions to make regarding them. You should know I'm biased towards Harvard references; they're neat, stack nicely, and link to their reference. Very tidy. I advise switching back to them, to avoid letter-spam in the Reflist. The citations themselves should be shrunk down to, for example, "Jackson 2015, p. #". There is no need to give the chapter of the book the page cited is located within. Reviewing the prose itself, I see a lot of the same source being used in citations in succession, sometimes for the entire paragraph. This is unnecessary and an unneeded increase of total article size; do not do this unless a citation is following a direct quotation. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 16:44, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

@Vami IV: Sorry I somehow missed this discussion at the time. I'm glad you prefer my citation style, and point taken about overzealous citation of every sentence. I would like to change the style back but it's going to take a lot of work. I don't use Discord so I'm curious about the discussion of this article: was there much more to it than what you summarised here? MartinPoulter (talk) 19:53, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

What a coincidence. I was just looking at this article earlier today, but had forgotten all about this post. I looked at the discussion on the Discord, and it was complaints by Ineffablebookkeeper (I think) about the citation formatting, as it made Jackson 2015 appear as though it were more than one source. –♠Vami_IV†♠ 20:21, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Unfortunately, someone who's not me is going to have to take this one; I've no actual experience with Harvard on Wikipedia, having yeeted all knowledge of Harvard referencing from my body as soon as I left university. I'm also busy revamping lang tags at the minute - tangential, but if either of you have any thoughts on the Cleanup Lang template mentioning the transl template within its message, I'd really appreciate any thoughts. Doesn't seem like many editors know the template exists, when they ought to. --Ineffablebookkeeper (talk) 21:05, 23 March 2021 (UTC)