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Happy editing!

It appears that you've been editing for about a year and no one's welcomed you! That's no good.

I've just been looking over the work that you've done on the History of theatre article. Great stuff. I wonder if I might make a small request. The big problem with Wikipedia, for which it is so often criticised, is that not enough of its material is supported with citations from reliable, third-party sources. Now, if you read the guidelines, they say that it's okay to have several sentences of information with only one citation at the end of the paragraph that indicates from where the information is taken. I suspect that this is what you've done in the article. It's true that this is allowed, but in practice that's not how it works. In effect, especially when it comes to assessing articles to indicate to the reader how good they are and to promote them to "Good Article" status or above, the trend these days is to provide a citation with every sentence.

This means that if your work gets moved around at a later stage or imported into a different article (which it most probably will), then the sources that support it are still 'attached'. Personally, I don't like to read a text that is overly cluttered with footnotes. So, the convention that I and many others adopt, is to provide all citations in a single note at the end of each sentence, after the punctuation mark. I also tend to prefer the MLA author-date system of referencing (see Hamlet for an example), because for articles with many sources that are cited many times, it soon gets cluttered otherwise.

Would it be possible for you to look over your contributions to the history of theatre article and to add in the sources for each? I imagine that this will more or less only be a matter of duplicating the citation given at the end of each paragraph.

I've just spent a little while cleaning up the article and importing some material for the earlier sections. Having worked through your 19th-century section, it strikes me that it might be just a little on the long side. So, if you don't mind I'm going to export the section to the Nineteenth-century theatre article in full. Then, I plan to try to summarise it for a section in the history of theatre article. You might like to read the article about summarising material. The basic gist is: the lead/introduction of the 19th-century theatre should summarise the contents of the entire article (see MoS Lead). That lead/intro can then be exported into articles such as history of theatre, with a "main" template linking back to the other article for more details. I've just spent a while working on the history of theatre, so I'm not sure that I'll get around to all this right now, but that's the plan I propose.

This work has been prompted by an improvement drive for the theatre article that I've just started. It would be great to summarise the account of 19th-century theatre that you've given there too (the theatre summary should be even shorter than the history of theatre summary, with all the detail in nineteenth-century theatre, if that makes sense). Redundancy and duplication are fine and good.

You might also like to add your name to the WikiProject Theatre collaboration - .

So, welcome once again, and keep up the good work!

Happy editing,  • DP •  ^{huh?} 23:51, 21 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]