User talk:Zidanne

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Hello, Zidanne, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using 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 your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! --Z 00:52, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

References to old books, with extensive quotes

Greetings, Zidanne. In the An Lushan Rebellion article, you added a dozen citations, mostly of 19th century or early 20th century books, with lengthy quotations. I'm afraid I've removed most of these, because they unbalanced the article. The role of citations is to allow the reader to check that the article text is accurate – the text of the article is the main thing, and citations are supposed to play a supporting role.

In this case the text in question consisted on one or two sentences on a tiny subtopic of the An Lushan Rebellion. For that we would normally select a small number of the highest quality references. (This essay expands on the point.) Very old sources have the virtue of being out of copyright, but unfortunately the views they contain, especially concerning Western views of other cultures, are outdated and have usually been superseded by modern scholarship, so more recent references are usually preferred. Sources dealing directly with the topic are also preferable to incidental references in works on a different subject. You also added large quotations, doubling the size of the article with references in support of these two sentences. These make the article unwieldy and are unnecessary. Our aim is to digest references and produce informative article text, not just dump the sources on the reader. Kanguole 09:30, 20 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]