User talk:Jetuusp

Shelton, Nebraska

Nice to see that you're working on a "History" section for Shelton, Nebraska. We need more editors doing Nebraska history, especially outstate. Maybe your example will even spur me to write the history section for the Kearney article that I keep planning to research and write...

I've been going through the Shelton article and doing a little copy-editing. One thing that I noticed is that you're not taking full advantage of named footnotes. When you've added a named citation like:
<ref name=something>Smith, John. A Book. Publisher, 2012</ref>
and you want to cite the same source again, you don't have to put all the author-title-publisher information in again; you can just type
<ref name=something/>
with a slash after the name, and with no need for a closing </ref> tag.
That not only saves typing time, but it makes it a lot easier to edit the article, since it's easier to read the text in the edit window without so much citation material.

Another thing I noticed is that you've got a lot of references to the Samuel Clay Bassett book. Repeating the author, title, publisher... in footnote after footnote makes it a little hard to read. You might want to take a look at what I did at Dowse Sod House, where I had a lot of references to the Welsch and Kampinen sources, with different page numbers. I think a course like that would make the references section easier to read, and would allow the reader to focus on the critical differences between the citations, viz., the page numbers.

Hello. I have no idea if I'm using this Talk page correctly so I would appreciate any tips there.

As it relates to Footnote Citations found in the Shelton article, given that the style used in the Dowse Sod House article may best apply to the style one would use with Parethetical Referencing, I wonder if the Shelton Footnotes are correct as is. See --> Parenthetical_referencing I realize you didn't insert them in the Dowse article but this is the only reference I can find to the style where a Reference Section is used at the end of the article. Please share your thoughts. Jetuusp (talk) 02:13, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I've also fixed a minor problem: there shouldn't be spaces between a word or punctuation mark and the footnote marker following it. Thus:
"... burned to the ground in 1893.<ref>...",
not
"...burned to the ground in 1893. <ref>..."

I apologize for subjecting you to all this un-asked-for advice; it's because I hope you'll keep working on the Shelton, and possibly on other Nebraska-history articles. If you're having any trouble figuring out Wikistuff, please feel free to leave a note at my talk page; I'd be glad to offer what help I can. Ammodramus (talk) 22:14, 11 November 2012 (UTC)