Talk:Economics of religion/version 2

Not CSD worthy, but messy

This article seems messy, and should be organized. Cheers, --Stevedietrich (talk) 19:34, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

Good eye. Still, onward & upward, with the help of others one hopes. And may it at least whet the appetite for some of the great sources I drew on (Smith, Iannaccone, et al.). --Thomasmeeks (talk) 21:53, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Citation Overkill

There are way too many citations and references on the page, far more than needed. any statement that would be enough with a single citation has 3-4 or sometimes 7 citations(71 total at the time of this post), the reference section is larger than the article section, can someone please look into the citations and refine them to one or two appropriate ones, I am not familiar enough with the topic to judge. Thanks --Theo10011 (talk) 18:30, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Thx for comment. Well, not everyone has access to that one or two perfect citations per subject. Many of the citations are illustrative, not something to be taken as definitive. If this were a fully fleshed out article many of the citations might be weaved into a narrative. In the absence of that, some readers might like more or less. At least those who would like less can just stop at the first reference. Those who really want to get into a subject might prefer to have the choice. Still, I'll take another look at pruning. --Thomasmeeks (talk) 03:09, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi Thomas, the article is very well cited almost to its fault. If you are familiar with the topic yourself and have access to all these citations might I suggest expanding the article yourself, perhaps you can mention different sources for the definitions separately in the article, at this point the reference section is twice as long as the article itself. One rarely comes across articles with as many citations mostly because some over-zealous editor or administrator will trim them down to conform to guidelines, My reason for leaving the message above was only hoping that someone familiar with the topic can trim or expand it rather than someone who might know little or nothing about the topic just policies and guidelines. Anyway, thanks for your reply and I hope you understand my intention here.--Theo10011 (talk) 09:47, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

I did follow the suggestion of the essay Wikipedia:Citation overkill for combining each batch of citations into a single footnote. This has the added advantage of allowing the reader to demarcate each batch more readily, besides reducing the number of footnotes. Each batch would allow an energetic editor to expand the article carefully using influential sources. Because most of the citations have links, it also allows the interested reader to follow topic threads to investigate those subjects in more detail. --Thomasmeeks (talk) 13:27, 29 April 2010 (UTC)