Talk:Devil's Den

Comment

According to Tim Smith's excellent book on Devil's Den, the "devil" may have been a very large snake that reputedly lived in a particular nook in the rock formation. The name predates the Civil War, so the comment that the soldiers named it the Devil's Den should be reworded. Scott Mingus 15:21, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Done. Hal Jespersen 16:54, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Nice summation! Thanks for adding it. Scott Mingus 17:27, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Alexander Gardner

body of Confederate sharpshooter, behind famous shooting blind at Devil's Den. This photograph is by Alexander Gardner and not by Timothy O'Sullivan as cited here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.90.112.204 (talk) 00:21, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction. O'Sullivan was Gardner's assistant at the scene. It's interesting to note that Frassanito's Early Photography reference cites this photo as "91a) Dead Confederate soldier at 'sharpshooter's position' in the rear of Devil's Den, O'Sullivan, plate, probably July 6 or 7, 1863" but then all the accompanying description refers to Gardner. Hal Jespersen (talk) 02:29, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Notes vs. References

Hlj, love your "Style guide, bibliography, watchlist, maintained articles." But "References" seems to be the Wikipedia standard header for the section that contains the reflist; any particular reason you prefer "Notes"? PRRfan (talk) 16:08, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I separate notes from references in the same manner that a history book or scholarly journal separates footnotes or endnotes from the bibliography. The References section contains full publishing information about the source and the Notes section contains abbreviated pointers to items in the reference list. (As you will see from one of my longer articles, many of my footnotes refer to multiple sources, which would make the occasional Wikipedia practice of having long format citations inside the footnotes completely impractical. It also makes it clumsier to rearrange text or to have multiple editors working on the same document when they have to keep track of which citation has to be longform versus short form.) Although I sometimes make an exception for a specialized reference, such as a newspaper article, that appears only once in the notes, I usually strive to include all of the full details of references in one place. I am aware that many Wikipedia articles contain a jumble of endnotes and bibliography entries all mixed up, particularly for those articles that rely primarily on web citations, and those are good articles for a consolidated References section name, but the 300+ articles that I strive to maintain are pretty consistent in separating notes from references. See User:Hlj/CWediting#Refs and Links. Hal Jespersen (talk) 16:24, 28 September 2010 (UTC)