Talk:Archibald Williams (judge)

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Article style

Thanks @Bloevy: for expanding this article considerably with your edits! You have put together quite a bit of information here. However there are some issues with the style that I think should be addressed, to be consistent with the style on Wikipedia in general, and perhaps to make the article easier to read.

The article currently has a list of general references at the end, but no inline citations. This makes it difficult to associate specific pieces of information with a source, which will be a problem especially when subsequent editors contribute further information, and it is no longer clear which statement comes from which source. See the guidelines on making inline citations
The section headings were originally formatted as bold text. I've changed them to the section heading format. I feel however that some of the sections are perhaps too short, and the article is broken up into too many sections for its length. The headers for the short sections also read more like narrative summaries than thematic headings, e.g. "Presided over Whig Party State Conventions in Illinois" and "Twice the Whig candidate for U.S. Senator". There're no hard and fast rules for headings, but the manual of style suggests looking at how similar articles do it. A good example in this case is the article Abraham Lincoln, which has Good Article status, and could offer a useful pattern for organizing this article.
Although it's acknowledged in the article that Archibald Williams's "historical significance was based on his close friendship with Abraham Lincoln", it is still the biography of Archibald Williams and not a chapter in the article on Lincoln. There's a disproportionate weight given to the activity and opinions of Lincoln, in my opinion, though I acknowledge that it's not so surprising given that it's Williams's main claim to fame.

I hope that you'll take these comments in good faith. I appreciate the work you've done in putting it together and also in making information from difficult-to-access sources available here, and I think that there is definitely the potential to make this one of the better articles on Wikipedia. Cheers, Kbseah (talk) 22:18, 31 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]