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July 2011

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  Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. Before saving your changes to an article, please provide an edit summary, which you forgot to do before saving your recent edit to Thomas Jefferson. Doing so helps everyone understand the intention of your edit (and prevents legitimate edits from being mistaken for vandalism). It is also helpful to users reading the edit history of the page. Thank you. Cognate247 (talk) 16:04, 14 July 2011 (UTC)Reply

Barnes reference

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I reverted the new reference concerning the Point Lookout prison camp which you added to the article on James Barnes. The reference squarely places the blame for the conditions at the camp, indeed the bad condition of all Union prison camps, on William Hoffman, commissary general of prisoners. The reference focuses more on Hoffman than on the camp and certainly more than on Barnes. It certainly does not place much blame on Barnes, except perhaps for his allowing a subordinate to impose harsher conditions than earlier existed without exercising proper oversight. That is not stated directly but seems to be necessarily implied. The point of the article was to answer a question about who received a "medal" for running this camp. Warner, p. 21, notes that Barnes received his brevet award "for Meritorious Services during the rebellion." Hunt and Brown, p. 288, state that Hoffman received his second brevet award "for faithful, meritorious and distinguished services as Commissary General of Prisoners during the War." Again, the focus of the article is on Hoffman and Hoffman received an award specifically related to his role with respect to prison camps. Barnes award was given for more general reasons. As such, the reference to this article in the new footnote is at best superfluous in a biography of Barnes. His command of the camp is otherwise noted. Unless read carefully, I think the title of the article shown in the footnote could be misleading as to the extent of Barnes's role and whether he received an award directly for it. Certainly if one looked at the footnote and saw the title, and did not read the article itself, one would get the impression the medal recipient referred to must be Barnes. I think most readers are not going to go any further than this footnote. The bottom line for me is that the reference may be more fitting in an article about Hoffman or even about the camp itself, but not about Barnes. I hope you agree. Donner60 (talk) 06:18, 26 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:49, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply