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Increase Mather

[edit]

Following several complains about the abysmal state of the previous version of the page ([1]), I tried to "clean-room" rewrite it to the current version. It's a big enough change that I'd appreciate more sets of eyes checking to see that I didn't inadvertendly make it worse ;). More specifically, there are a few concerns I have:

  • Completeness: Do I need to go into more detail on something specific, such as a time period?
  • Are the events mentioned arrainged understandably (One of the complaints about the original version was that it was confusing to follow)?
  • Did I cite all the stuff correctly? Mostly it's the actual citation formatting that I'd like others to check.

Anything else that comes to mind I'll listen to and see if they can be used to improve the articel. 68.39.174.238 08:20, 14 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bookgrrl sez: Definitely better, good work! Couple of comments:

  • To my eyes it's actually over-sourced believe it or not! For example, birth and death dates don't generally need to be sourced unless there's some conflict over them. Also, you don't need multiple citations for a single fact (unless, again, it's controversial) so quite a lot of the footnotes can be removed.
  • Reference format -- The individual references are good. However the footnotes in the text are numbered but the ones at the bottom are not numbered, which is confusing. You can use <ref> tags to fix that, see here. Basically the text of the citation goes in with the first reference, for example
<ref>{{cite web|title=Mather, Increase. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.  
 2001-05.|publisher=Bartleby.com|url=http://www.bartelby.net/65/ma/Mather-I.html|
 accessdate=October 12|accessyear=2006}}</ref>
After that you just use <ref name=citation_name/> similar to what you have done. Then at the end, instead of listing the text of the references you simply put <references/> and that will populate the list and number them appropriately.
  • To my eyes it's over-wikified as well. The purpose of Wikilinks is to link to articles that will enhance the reader's understanding of the main topic (in this case Increase Mather). As such, each and every date does not need to be Wiki'ed, and words that add nothing to our understanding of the man (e.g. "intoxication" "weather") shouldn't be wikilinked. Also, only the first occurrence of a term is generally Wiki'ed.
  • Still needs a little formalization on the wording (e.g. "he ditched that when it..." is pretty slangy!)
-- Bookgrrl 12:13, 16 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Reply: I've removed the datesources, as the only real "contention" about them was someone's dyslexia. I've tried to hack at some other over-sourced stuff. I SRONGLY dislike the "new" references format. I've tried to cut down on the spurious wikification, and have cleaned up that sentence. Are there any other specific examples that need work? 68.39.174.238 09:44, 17 October 2006 (UTC) (I've also added a new source to clean up the confusion about his immediate family)[reply]
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