This is a page that I use for common editing style for American Civil War articles. I have written or edited well over 300 articles and try to use consistent punctuation, capitalization, styles of references, etc. Although my choices are not definitive, they are usually based on The Chicago Manual of Style (16th Ed.), which is the gold standard for editors of academic history books and journal articles in the United States, and on Wikipedia:Manual of Style. In any event, if I need to discuss stylistic matters with new readers, I can always point them at this page and not reinvent the wheel. Comments are welcome. Hal Jespersen (talk) 23:19, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
Wikipedia attempts to use the most popular version of a person's name as the title of his/her article. For instance, Ulysses S. Grant or Stonewall Jackson. I usually do not attempt to fool around with these choices. However, there is the issue of what to call the person within another article. I try to be consistent about this and match the usage patterns of modern Civil War historians:
[[Stonewall Jackson | Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson]] [[Jubal Anderson Early | Jubal Early]] [[Edward Johnson (general) | Edward "Allegheny" Johnson]] [[William Tecumseh Sherman | William T. Sherman]] [[William Henry Fitzhugh Lee | W.H.F. "Rooney" Lee]] [[William Farrar Smith | William F. "Baldy" Smith]] [[Benjamin Franklin Butler (politician) | Benjamin Butler]] [[Edward Johnson (general) | Edward "Allegheny" Johnson]] [[William "Bull" Nelson]] [[William E. Jones | William E. "Grumble" Jones]] [[John Pope (military officer) | John Pope]]
[[General (United States) | Gen.]] [[Lieutenant general (United States) | Lt. Gen.]] [[Major general (United States) | Maj. Gen.]] [[Brigadier general (United States) | Brig. Gen.]] [[General (CSA) | Gen.]] [[Lieutenant General (CSA) | Lt. Gen.]] [[Major General (CSA) | Maj. Gen.]] [[Brigadier General (CSA) | Brig. Gen.]] [[Colonel (United States) | Col.]] [[Lieutenant colonel (United States) | Lt. Col.]] [[Major (United States) | Maj.]] [[Captain (U.S. Army) | Capt.]] [[First Lieutenant#United States | 1st Lt.]] [[Second Lieutenant#United States | 2nd Lt.]] [[brevet (military) | Bvt.]] [[Regular Army (United States) | regular army]]
[[77th Regiment of New York Volunteers | 77th New York Infantry]] [[1st Cavalry Regiment (United States) | 1st U.S. Cavalry]]
For the first sentence of a biography:
The biography should be in rough chronological sequence after that brief first paragraph. Avoid tabular listings of dates, ranks, assignments, etc. Although reference works and websites often list dozens of dates about a person, don't bore the reader by using them all; pick the significant ones. Try to sprinkle in anecdotes and quotes about the person in the appropriate places; don't put them all at the end. However, one quote "summing up the man" at the end is a nice touch.
The statement about death names the place of death (not the date unless it's something interesting or ironic) and the place of burial.
Virtually all biographies now use subheadings. I believe that subheads that introduce only two or three sentences are a waste of time. Some of the headings I do try to use are:
And ones I avoid:
I never create these myself because I think they are mostly busy work and an opportunity for the article text and the box to get out of sync, but I find that other industrious people do add them. Stylistically, the question is what information should be repeated in the normal text of the article. I assume that the article text takes precedence and create links and name dates, units, locations, and commanders in the main article text as if the box were not there. (For instance, I always ensure that the full name of an individual is listed with a link, not assuming that the reader will go to the box to find the link.)
For the biography infobox, there is a field used for battles. The stylistic trick here is to select the important battles and campaigns and not provide an exhaustive list. (Some soldiers fought in dozens of battles.) I lean toward using the campaign names instead of individual battles unless the soldier made a particular contribution to (or was killed in) one specific battle. It is possible to use regular Wiki formatting in this field as follows:
|battles=[[Mexican-American War]]<br>[[American Civil War]] * [[Seven Days Battles]] ** [[Battle of Gaines' Mill]] * [[Battle of Gettysburg]] * [[Overland Campaign]]
There is a problem in some articles because of the combination of the Infobox Military Conflict and Campaignbox templates, such as displaced [Edit] links and left-aligned images. I have started using the following formulation to correct this:
{| style="float: right; clear: right; background-color: transparent"
|-
|((Infobox Military Conflict
|conflict=Battle of Gettysburg
|partof=the [[American Civil War]]
...
))
|-
|((Campaignbox XXX))
|}
An alternative method is described in WP:BUNCH.
I find all the References and External links sections in Wiki are confusing and used inconsistently. I try to follow these guidelines:
Here's a summary:
| Type | Used as a source for the article, usually footnoted | Additional, interesting information |
|---|---|---|
| Books, magazine articles | References | Further reading |
| Websites, URLs | References | External links |
|
Further information: [[:WP:FN]] |
Almost all of my articles written since 2008 use extensive footnotes, usually one or more per paragraph. (In the early days of Wikipedia there was little emphasis on citations and I relied solely on lists of References at the end of the article. Sadly, many of the articles are still in this state.) I dislike merely embedding a URL in the main text, which I call a "blind link" because you have to click it to find out what it points to, so I use a footnote.
((reflist)) or ((reflist|colwidth=30em))The ((Reflist)) macro does the complete job of formatting the notes. When the |colwidth=30em is included, it displays in multiple columns—usually two, but more in a really wide browser window. I generally use multiple columns only for articles with more than 10 footnotes.
For the first six years of my Wikipedia work I used a style of Reference citation that looked pretty good, but sometimes was subjected to criticism for deviating from academic norms. In 2010 I converted over to the Notes/Bibliography style described in the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, which is used extensively for history scholarship; see Chicago 14.2. A useful summary of this style is available at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html, in which it refers to the "humanities style (notes and bibliography)". This is often called the Chicago/Turabian format.[3] Here are a few representative examples (although they would normally be sorted by author surnames):
| * Bradley, Mark L. This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett Place. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8078-2565-4. | This is the basic one-author book style. Note that since "North Carolina" appears in the publisher's name, Chicago says it is not necessary to specify it after "Chapel Hill." Also note that I never link to publisher names or their city names, which I consider to be useless over-linking. |
| * Bridges, Hal. Lee's Maverick General: Daniel Harvey Hill. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8032-6096-2. First published 1961 by McGraw-Hill. | In this example, I am using a reprint edition of the book. |
| * Eicher, John H., and David J. Eicher. Civil War High Commands. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8047-3641-3. | The first author is listed surname-first, but subsequent authors are not. California is indicated for those not aware of Stanford's location. This is one of the rare instances where I do not spell out state names. |
| * Kennedy, Frances H., ed. The Civil War Battlefield Guide. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998. ISBN 0-395-74012-6. | This is an example of a book whose complete text is available online. I do not use this technique to link to books offered for sale at Amazon or for snippets on Google Books—the linked field that represents the ISBN number provides a wealth of links to buy books, find them in libraries, and find snippets. |
| * McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford History of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-19-503863-0. | A book in a series. |
| * Beckman, W. Robert. "Daniel Edgar Sickles." In Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, edited by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. ISBN 0-393-04758-X. | This is the style for a chapter in a book and how the editors of the book are indicated. |
| * Alexander, Edward P. Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8078-4722-4. | A memoir written by one person, edited by another. |
| * Robertson, William Glenn. "The Chickamauga Campaign: The Fall of Chattanooga." Blue & Gray Magazine, Fall 2006. | A magazine article. |
| * Polk, Capt. W. N. “Battle of Chickamauga.” Southern Historical Society Papers 10, no. 1/2 (January/February 1882): 1-24. | A journal article. Note that Chicago wants page numbers for journal articles, but not for magazine articles. (It is arguable whether the SHSP is a true journal, but many authors seem to treat it as such.) |
A complete list of my ACW library in this style is at User:Hlj/CWbibliography. A helpful tool for correctly formatting ISBNs is the website http://www.isbn.org/converterpub.asp.
As more and more citations are added to Wikipedia articles, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make casual or random edits to those paragraphs that are documented with footnotes. When you make a change, it is unacceptable to add or modify information that is not documented by the cited references for that text unless you adjust the footnotes accordingly. Some Wikipedia articles use footnotes at the sentence or phrase level, but I reserve that practice only for direct quotations within a paragraph or for facts or opinions that could be considered controversial (and thus, the reader may wish to jump directly to the citation). Otherwise, I usually group all of the citations for a paragraph into a single compound footnote, which is a practice that is relatively common with modern Civil War authors.[4] One consequence of paragraph level footnoting is that a paragraph cannot be broken in half easily, unless the paragraph breaker has access to the cited references and can adjust which page citations go with which of the new smaller paragraphs.
Let me use a few examples based on a simple article sentence. In the following list, the notation [FN=] shows what the text of the footnote would look like without going through the actual <ref> mechanism.
Here is current article sentence:
The following is an invalid modification, because Eicher did not indicate who the parents were:
One of the following two formats is an appropriate way to make that change:
Suppose you found another author who disagrees on the birthplace. The following is also an invalid modification:
Any of the following forms would be appropriate, based on the relative credibility of the various sources:
That final format, in which the name of the author is listed in the body of the text, should be reserved for those cases in which a preponderance of the citations—the traditional or conventional view—are being balanced by a fresh interpretation by a well-known and respected author. This kind of usage is more likely when differing opinions are being expressed, rather than the hard facts in this example.
|
Further information: [[:MOS:SYL]] |
I code American-style dates, which was the format used at the time, as evidenced by the Official Records. For example, July 3, 1863, not 3 July 1863. At one time there was a date formatting standard that used forms looking like links to adjust to the reader's personal preferences. For example:
However, the MoS has now deprecated autoformatting, so almost all of these date formats are now gone.
Here are some date recommendations based on the MoS and general grammar:
| No | Use instead |
|---|---|
| 1 July 1863 was the first day of battle | July 1, 1863, was the first day of battle |
| 7/1/63 or 1/7/63 | July 1, 1863 |
| July 1st | July 1 |
| the 1st | July 1 |
| 1st of July | July 1 |
| July of 1863 | July 1863 |
| July, 1863 | July 1863 |
| from 1861-65 | from 1861 to 1865 |
There is a new effort underway to embed microformat dates into articles, by using the ((start-date)) and ((end-date)) templates into the infoboxes for battles and biographies. These are pretty straight-forward, but different editors are using different styles of displaying the ranges within a single month. My style is to use "September 19–20, 1863" rather than, say, "September 19 – September 20, 1863." (Of course, if the month boundary is crossed, it would be "September 30 – October 1, 1863." The way to achieve my style is:
((start-date|September 19, 1863|September 19))–((end-date|September 20, 1863|20, 1863))
In both templates, the first parameter generates the microformat date (which is invisible in the normal browser depiction of the page) and the second is what is actually displayed by the browser.
|
Further information: [[:WP:QUOTE]] |
Quotations should not be rendered in italic text, per the manual of style. If the quotation is only a sentence or two, I generally put it inline with simple quotation marks. For longer quotations, the use of the <blockquote> mechanism is appropriate, but I have just recently found the ((Quotation)) template and am starting to use it to good effect. Coding:
((Quotation|If I was an artist like you, ... Confederate ''gray''.|Robert E. Lee|letter to Markie Williams))
If I was an artist like you, I would draw a true picture of Traveller; representing his fine proportions, muscular figure, deep chest, short back, strong haunches, flat legs, small head, broad forehead, delicate ears, quick eye, small feet, and black mane and tail. Such a picture would inspire a poet, whose genius could then depict his worth, and describe his endurance of toil, hunger, thirst, heat and cold; and the dangers and suffering through which he has passed. He could dilate upon his sagacity and affection, and his invariable response to every wish of his rider. He might even imagine his thoughts through the long night-marches and days of the battle through which he has passed. But I am no artist Markie, and can therefore only say he is a Confederate gray.
— Robert E. Lee, letter to Markie Williams
There is also the simpler ((Quote)) template, as follows:
((Quote|I, Philip Kearny, an old soldier, ... cowardice or treason.))
I, Philip Kearny, an old soldier, enter my solemn protest against this order for retreat. We ought instead of retreating should follow up the enemy and take Richmond. And in full view of all responsible for such declaration, I say to you all, such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason.
Another option is the ((Quote box)) side-box style. It's a good way for adding a bit of color to a description.
... every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the [Confederates] slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker[7]
((Quote box |align=right |width=35% |quote=... every stalk of corn ... a few moments before. |source=Maj. Gen. [[Joseph Hooker]]<ref>Bailey, p. 70.</ref> |))
I think abbreviations without periods are sloppy writing, so use:
An exception to this rule applies to USA and CSA. These aren't used frequently outside of infoboxes because they are ambiguous, meaning the names of the countries as well as the Armies. Furthermore, USA meaning U.S. Army also carries a connotation of the regular army, vs. the volunteer ranks (USV), and that's a distinction that's too subtle for most civilian readers.
As mentioned elsewhere, I do not abbreviate state names in the main body of the articles, using either the modern USPS two-letter style (MN) or the longer style (Minn.) used during the war. This is a courtesy to readers outside the U.S.
I attempt to use a common style for the possessive form of singular nouns, including formal names. In WP:MOS#Possessives, the Wikipedia manual of style graciously offers three alternative styles and tells you to choose one, but use it consistently within an article. I use the first option, which conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., sections 7.16–18. (In previous editions of Chicago, they were marginally supportive of the third Wikipedia style, but in the latest edition they explicitly recommend against using it. See 7.21.) The recommended style is to add apostrophe-S to all singular possessives, even those that end in S, whether the S sound is pronounced or not. Examples given by Chicago are Kansas's legislature, Marx's theories, Jesus's adherents, Descartes's three dreams, Albert Camus's novels, Euripides's tragedies, Xerxes's armies.
I avoid the colloquialisms Yankees and Rebels (and certainly things like the "horsemen in blue" or the "graybacks") in articles I write from scratch. I normally use Union (coded as [[Union Army|Union]]) more frequently than Federal, but sometimes mix them up to avoid boring repetition.
Colorful colloquialisms should be avoided for a few reasons:
There are two kinds of dashes, neither of which can be a hyphen instead. In both cases, I use the HTML coding shown here instead of using the Unicode characters (because some text editors don't handle those characters well). Note that MOS:DASH is comfortable enough with this HTML coding style that lists it as the first method for entering these dashes.
May 23, 1824 – September 13, 1881