User talk:Seanhaupt

Welcome!

Hello, Seanhaupt, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions, especially your edits to Peter Kropotkin. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! JesseRafe (talk) 19:31, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Great Chinese Famine

Hi Seanhaupt, and let me welcome you also. Thank you for your contribution to Great Chinese Famine, and thanks for adding the Yang-1998 reference. I have one question about the ref: when I look at page 63, I see figure 3 showing a scatterplot of "Mess hall participation rate and provincial mortality rate," and I'm not sure how that substantiates the atrocities and grain confiscations. Can you be more specific? Check out the {{cite book}} param |quote=; maybe you could quote specific text (if it's text, and not part of the image) in the ref, to identify exactly what part of the page you are referring to. Or, am I looking at a different edition, and page 63 isn't figure 3 in your version? Thanks again for your contributions, Mathglot (talk) 21:09, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot:

Hello, in my citation I cited page 65. I see how the scatterplot on 63 could be confusing though with no context! On page 65 you will see that Yang states that the perceived superabundance of grains created a situation in which the Chinese government thought it okay to continue taking more grain than there, in reality was, and caused a "Great leap ferver." If further context on the atrocities of people, i.e. the accusations of peasants stealing grain etc., is needed then let me know so I can add in another citation. Seanhaupt (talk) 21:57, 18 January 2018 (UTC) - Update** I am not sure why but I had two wikipedia pages open with one showing 63 and the other showing 65. I closed them out and reopened the page and it appears that it is 63 that is appearing on this page. I will fix that! Sorry for any confusion :) Seanhaupt (talk) 22:01, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I think you're going to be a great editor. Here's another tip: I'm a huge fan and booster of WorldCat (you'll see their links in all my book citations) but a better way to use them, imho, is to use the |oclc= param of the {{cite book}} template. This frees up the |url= param to be used for other urls, notably a google books url. That would make your reference something like this:

<ref name="Yang-1996">{{cite book |author=Dali L. Yang |title=Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VmLuoAkMKrkC&pg=PA65 |accessdate=18 January 2018 |year=1996 |publisher=Stanford University Press |isbn=978-0-8047-3470-7 |page=65 |oclc=228387491}}</ref>

. Note that in this case, google books preview doesn't contain page 65, so you can't see it directly, but you can see a lot of context, and it's better than not seeing anything at all. Had the reference been page 63, it would be visible to readers clicking the title in the reference list. As an additional benefit of using a google books search, once you find the url, say, https://books.google.com/books?id=VmLuoAkMKrkC&pg=PA33, you can use the reftag tool to create the Wikipedia citation for you, click the "Today" button to add the refdate, add the oclc number into the "Other fields" input box, click "Make citation" and end up with something like this example: Mao spoke at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in 1957.^[1]. Then, when you click the blue title in the reference, it goes straight to the google books reference, and if the page is visible in preview, the reader can actually view and read it. The WorldCat link is still there, but it's in the OCLC link, so the title becomes clickable and goes to the google books result. Hope this helps! Mathglot (talk) 22:58, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Dali L. Yang (1996). Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-8047-3470-7. OCLC 228387491. Retrieved 18 January 2018.

[Yang1996-1] Dali L. Yang (1996). Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-8047-3470-7. OCLC 228387491. Retrieved 18 January 2018.

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