User talk:ShenandoahValley

Your recent edits

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Sheridan

Hal: I agree with you that a lot of Sheridan is battle description. However, I've only modified Perryville and Chickamauga and have not added to the length. In both cases to focus more specifically on Sheridan. I am brand new at wikipedia and want to get this done right.

As for biographies, my thought is that development of the subject's personality and impact should be the primary focus. Am I reaching by wanting to put in things like quotes from Sheridan. For example at Chickamauga, I have a newspaper account by a colonel who saw Sheridan crying at the destruction of his division. There is another at Chickamauga where he sees his men being forced back into the battle line by subordinate officers, cut down by Confederate fire but unable to return fire because of retreating Yankee mobs from the front line. Sheridan screamed out to the officers, "Let them go! Let them go for their lives!" I was thinking the bio entroy could show Chickamauga as the biggest whipping that Sheridan ever got in his life. I would cut out the he went this way and that way and focus on him. There is also a great quote from Gen. Lovell Rousseau on Sheridan at Stones River. It would tell the reader more about Sheridan in combat that simply saying he was promoted x date to rank from x date.

What are your thoughts?

On the overland, I didn't have much of a problem with most of the section. Just the statement that he lost all the battles but one. I don't think this is needed as a contrarian position. Rather, eliminate that statement and the Sheridan quote. Both are what I would view as being on either extreme.

Procedure question: I'll be making some extensive edits to the Valley. Is there a way that I can store proposed edits without changing the actual content?

ShenandoahValley (talk) 01:43, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

My apologies for the delay in responding, but somehow I missed this posting to my talk page until now. Sometimes when you follow the "new messages" link and there are multiple updates, you only focus on the very last one. I always try to be responsive, so if you've find that I am delaying excessively, you can try e-mailing me using the link at the top of my user page.

It is certainly appropriate to have quotations from the person in question. In general, I prefer to use lengthier quotations rather than than mere exclamations on the battlefield, unless those exclamations have some historic value, such as "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" or "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." It is obviously a judgment call about which ones are historic. The Wikipedia rule of thumb is that each quotation needs an individual citation. Generally, I put citations in groups at the end of a paragraph, but direct quotations get their own individual citations.

I guess we will have to disagree on the Overland campaign. I am not one of those people who tends to turn the blacks and whites of history into grays by omissions or by excessively citing counter examples to any definitive statement. If you disagree with Wittenberg's assessment, rather than omitting it, you can cite the counter opinion of Rhea's.

You can store proposed edits in a sandbox. Just create a new file called User:ShenandoahValley/sandbox (or any other name inside your own User space). If you look at my user page, you will see that I have created a number of sub files to my user page for various purposes. Hal Jespersen (talk) 22:52, 10 April 2008 (UTC)