Talk:Mysterious Dave Mather

message: Thank you for merging the articles.  I have gone through and cleaned up the unified article. Mbaugh 17:26, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thanks 

message: I made the same change here that I did in the page on Dave Rudabaugh.  Las Vegas, New Mexico and Dodge City, Kansas are more than 350 miles apart.  Las Vegas, New Mexico cannot be said to be a "nearby" city to Dodge City.Perry Hotter (talk) 12:58, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Las Vegas, New Mexico 

message: Jack, thanks for your continued additions to this article! As an example of what remains to be done, please compare your original version of the second paragraph to the edited version I completed as an example for you. 
It'd be helpful if you could:
* Pare down some of the conversational content like " Whether their partnership extended beyond business, to pleasure, isn't known" 
* Remove unsupported attributions like "leading to the erroneous conclusion"
* Cut out unattributed editorial phrases like "Dave seems to have stayed out of the news..."
* Edit windy non-encyclopedic style language like "where he found employment as a policeman under City Marshal Samuel Farmer."
* Cut to the chase like a a news reporter: Just the facts, no more. For example, the entire section "Lydia Wright Mather vs. Lydia Mather Randle" can be reduced to two sentences.
As I've written on your talk page before, I strongly encourage you to review the guidelines like those provided in writing better articles. Observing these principles will substantially improve your contributions. Please don't expect other WP editors to fix your own work. As the article stands right now, it'd take hours for someone unfamiliar with the topic to plow through the required edits. That's an unfair burden on them. It's possible that an impatient editor could instead just ax a lot of your contributions because they are so far from encyclopedic content.  — btphelps (talk to me) (what I've done) 19:56, 16 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Let me lend my voice to this discussion and reiterate that we are writing an encyclopedia article here, not a magazine article. The idea is to inform, not entertain. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 12:42, 17 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Seconding the two editors above. Wikipedia needs knowledgeable editors and so it's of course positive that an expert edits the article, but you need to keep your intended audience in mind and write in a style that's encyclopedic. The subheadings in the article don't meet either of those requirements: they are creative and flowery but in several cases, the headings don't tell the reader what the section contains, and sometimes you use imagery that only some of the readers will understand. "A Connecticut Yankee", to take one example, does not tell us that we'll be reading about Mather's parents, and for many of the readers the literary allusion will be lost. I freely admit that I had no idea what the heading "Buffalo Chips" even meant - it's a colloquialism I was unfamiliar with - but that aside, "cow dung" says absoluty nothing about the content of the section. And so on. In a book or a popular history magazine, this kind of creative, fun heading is a good way of introducing a section, but an encyclopedia article calls for a different tone.  And the tone issues, as noted above, apply to the running text as well. The subject of the article is plenty exciting and entertaining, and so there is no need to spice up the language - the facts speak for themselves. --bonadea contributions talk 09:13, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  I have taken up the task myself, and rewritten the article in encyclopedic style. In doing so, I have removed much of the information that was purely speculative, and much information that was largely irrelevant. Issues of the identity of Mather's mother have been removed (if other authors have misidentified her, that is their problem, but does not require an entire section to clarify), and the tale of the "unmysterious Mather" (i.e. Josiah) has also been removed. This article isn't about him. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 18:16, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  , thanks for taking on the challenge of cutting this article down to encyclopedic style. A great job! If you feel inclined,  made a large number of similarly non-encyclopedic edits to Luke Short, and it needs the same kind of attention. — btphelps (talk to me) (what I've done) 15:33, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edits for encyclopedic style 

message: I removed the article tags for excessive/intricate detail and non-encyclopedic tone because it appears they are no longer relevant. The article appears straightforward and I wouldn't say it has more detail than the average wikipedian can handle, thanks to recent edits; perhaps these tags are relicts of a time when they were necessary? Apologies if I am mistaken and the article should still be tagged this way. — PJsg1011 (talk) 08:47, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed tags