User talk:Meaganhat

Edits to Frederick the Great
Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you have a good experience here, and I hate to be a downer after your first non-userspace edit, but I've reverted the changes you made to Frederick the Great. Let's talk about why. You added a note that Fred "was accompanied by Carl Jacob Christian Klipfel", but this person doesn't even have an article in the English Wikipedia. Is he a notable musician? If so, maybe you could create an article about him; meanwhile, it seems irrelevant to know that Fred spent time with someone (perhaps) not notable enough to be documented in his own page. Likewise, the note about Frederick William's guidance of his son's religious education doesn't quite fit into a section about musical composition (though the source you cited looks very interesting, and can probably be used to improve some other part of the article!). Your sentence about "themes included in his work" likewise seems out of context (what works are you referring to? His musical compositions? Something else?), and it never gets around to saying what those themes might be. I can't read German well enough to casually peruse the source you cited for the claim that Fred "helped to usher in the Romantic period", but that's a pretty huge claim, and I wonder whether the source really supports it; the vague language about the "musical community" is also problematic.

One reason I'm being such a stickler here is that Frederick's biography is a Featured Article that has gone through a lengthy review process, in which it was refined through the collaboration of a dozen or more editors over a period of months. Featured Articles absolutely can (and should!) still be improved upon after they are recognized as such, but it's probably wise to be a little more cautious about large additions or changes, since they need to match the level of care that has been shown in the existing portions of the article. You'll probably have an easier time getting the hang of Wikipedia's style, conventions and expectations if you start by editing an article that's currently at a lower level of completion and polish. Also, I'll point out that the "minor edit" box you ticked for that edit is meant to be used for trivial, non-controversial changes like fixing a broken template, correcting a typographical error, updating a dead link, or the like. Substantial changes to the content of an article shouldn't be marked as "minor". I hope you'll find lots of interesting topics to work on here! Editors who speak other languages (and can therefore fluently access sources published in those languages) are especially helpful, so you could really help with a lot of topics that touch on the German language. Please let me know if I can clarify anything or help you to get started! Welcome, again! -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 18:04, 20 October 2022 (UTC)