Talk:Sarah Crosby

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hemarcello.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:20, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Potential sources list

 * I hope to add more information about Crosby's life and work within the Methodist Church. There is not much on her page besides saying that she was the first female Methodist preacher. If I can, I would like to add more details about her personal life. But I mostly want to focus on how she became the first woman to be a Methodist preacher, and how successful she was.

Potential sources
Hemarcello (talk) 04:15, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Editing advice
(For starters, I apologize if this section comes off as condescending give the dispute on versions of this page - I just want to offer advice that I think is sound) (Before-post edit: Ahhh! I did break the banners! Man, that's pretty embarrassing. Thanks for fixing it!)

Firstly, I want to congratulate you (Hemarcello) on your work here, as at Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, which you have made a C and B-class respectively. I thought I should offer some advice to make it better. Firstly, your prose, while well-cited, is not concise and feels needlessly long. For example, Crosby did not become particularly interested in religion until she was 14 years old, when she began to attend Anglican services. Around this time she started to develop a fear of death, which pushed her to become more religious. Her fear of death became most pronounced when she was 17, perhaps because of a bout of illness. As a result, she devoted herself even more to religion, fearing that she would die and be sent to Hell. feels very mechanical. Rather, I propose: Crosby did not become interested in religion until she began attending Anglican services at 14 years of age. She developed a fear of death that became very pronounced three years later, perhaps because of a bout of illness, pushing her to become more religious out of a fear that she would go to Hell. However, it could just be that you're compiling prose to be later condensed and I just don't know that.

The other thing is citations in certain areas, such as here: During the summer of 1758 Crosby moved to the Moorfields, to live with Sarah Ryan, Mary Clark, and Mary Bosanquet, all of whom would become prominent female figures in Methodism in the years to come.[19] They worked together to assist the poor and disabled.[19] and Because there was no Methodist Society in Leytonstone,[40] Mary Bosanquet and Crosby instituted nightly Scriptural readings and prayer.[41] The women asked John Wesley to send them a preacher in order to have a more religious environment inside of the orphanage.[41]. Same disclaimer as above applies, but it looks much cleaner to have sentences or entire paragraphs end in one citation - as long as the source used is credible, you're good to go.

And on the topic of sources and citation, I'd like to address the References section. You have "Bibliography" below References, but each citation still uses the full wikicode syntax and sometimes twice or more for the same book but a different page. It's easy enough to shrink these down for the benefit of the reader, however. Consider Template:Ref, which allows you to name citations, or Template:Sfn, which generates a Harvard reference and a link to the work you cited in the bibliography, as long as you attach within the Cite book or journal templates. This will condense "References" and make it much easier for a reader to trace a citation to its source reference, which they can use for their own research.

X – Vami _IV✠  23:59, 8 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the feedback, ! It's finals week for me, but after all that is over I will look into condensing my languages and trying out the template you suggested with the citations.
 * Also - no worries when it comes to the WikiProjects. The article was already a part of these Projects before I started editing and I believe that they were rightfully assigned. I noticed that you had added it to WikiProject United Kingdom rather than WikiProject England; England suits this page better I think, as the UK didn't exist when Crosby was alive.
 * Thanks again, Hemarcello (talk) 01:59, 12 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Those projects had nothing to do with the creation of this article and so should be given little prominence in the article's history. I have adjusted the templates accordingly, adding one which explains how the article came to be created.  It's good to see Hemarcello expanding the article and I'll chip in with some technical help when I get a moment.  Yuitsum is reading through it now too. Andrew D. (talk) 07:23, 12 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you! I added a bit to the legacy section about the Methodist Girls' School in Ipoh — I think it would be great if Yuitsum could look over it/shed some more light on that section. Hemarcello (talk) 00:30, 18 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I have changed the citations to the sfn template as you suggested on both this article and on Mary Bosanquet Fletcher. It is much cleaner looking, thank you for the advice! I also tried to condense the language, but I am honestly quite used to writing long-windily. I will try to work on that more. Hemarcello (talk) 00:30, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
 * There are a few harv errors. I have a fix for this, thankfully - in fact, I point them out because that fix allows me to see the errors. Go your common.js and paste "importScript('User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js');" into the first available line and then save the edit. – Vami _IV✠  13:44, 19 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the tip! I have imported the script and fixed the errors. Hemarcello (talk) 22:37, 22 June 2018 (UTC)
 * No problem, and excellent work. – Vami _IV✠  16:01, 1 July 2018 (UTC)