Talk:Samuel B. Ruggles

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the politics and government work group.

New York (state) Low‑importance

	New York (state) portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject New York (state), a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of New York on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.New York (state)Wikipedia:WikiProject New York (state)Template:WikiProject New York (state)New York (state) articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Keep more material in lead

This content gives insight into the society of the day.Parkwells (talk) 19:24, 23 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WP Policy

Is to require citations, so that people know specifically where the facts come from. A list of sources is not enough - how do you determine the NY Times article is incorrect? What is the source for correct facts?Parkwells (talk) 19:40, 23 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at a list of canal commissioners, you see that he was NOT in office for 18 years. That's easy. Most of the lead which I deleted was either written factually wrong like "was elected a commissioner to the Erie Canal" or contained WP:Weasel words. Uncontroversial content does not need to be footnoted in short bios, since the same info is in almost all the sources, and it is not helpful to add a lot of footnotes in a text, like 5 times citing the obit. Only disputed dates or events, or unusual behavior or utterances, need to be sourced in footnotes. That's encyclopedic standard. Besides, the way you edited the article, the references were doubled, and then mentioned again in the sopurce list, making it three times the same thing, that is NOT helpful at all. The article should contain correct info, and it should remain READABLE. Nevertheless, edit as you see fit, if the article improves it is ok with me, if not I might re-edit later again. Kraxler (talk) 23:37, 23 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]