Talk:Reconstruction

Explanation of edits made to this article

As soon as this posting is done, I will upload a version containing the following edits (none of which involved any revisions whatsoever of the main article content):

• The method of producing in-text references (of which there were 54) was revised to CZ-ify so that the references actually include citations instead of being a list of very brief notes pointing to an extensive Bibliographic section in the main article. In other words, the 2-step system of referencing was converted to the more usual 1-step system. By so doing and utilizing the <ref name=XXX> </ref> method of handling multiple uses of the same reference source, the 54 reference citations were reduced to 30 citations.

• The extensive Bibliographic section in the main article was then no longer necessary and was deleted. Also, all of them were already included in the even more extensive Bibliography subpage.

• The main article section entitled "Primary Sources" was moved to the "Primary Sources" section of the very extensive Bibliography sub-pages which already included all but one of them.

• Revised the Table in the "Black officers" section of the main article so as to use the wikitable class which simplified the markup coding.

I also plan to revise the Metadata template status of 1 to status 2. This article was a CZ import and needs a lot of review and cleanup ... and still contains place holders for Wikipedia graphics which were never uploaded as yet. Also, the Related Articles subpage needs much more expansion.

I am not a historian expert by any stretch of imagination, and that is why I made no changes in the articles content. However, I do have excellent knowledge of how to format articles, wikitables and in-text references .... and that is why my edits are limited to those areas. Milton Beychok 04:54, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

I have now uploaded the three missing graphics that were not uploaded when the article was ported from Wikipedia. Milton Beychok 06:57, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Great looking article Milton. Near the bottom there is a table containing dates that have been wikilinked. A while back I came across a page that was a redirect from a specific date, and says Citizendium currently does not maintain articles on these topics, mainly because of maintainability. If you have an idea how such content could be created and maintained systematically, please discuss it in the forums. Has there been any advancement on that topic? David Finn 07:36, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

David, linking the states' names is okay ... but linking the dates is an idiotic Wikipedia-ism. I start un-linking them, but I got some real life business today. Would you please finish the un-linking of the dates? Thanks, Milton Beychok 16:08, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

No problem. I agree linking dates is not needed, although I wouldn't mind if we had articles on specific years - I find that helps to set events in context sometimes. I found the forum thread that discussed this idea, but the discussion sadly tailed off. Cheers! David Finn 16:19, 18 October 2010 (UTC)