Drowning not waving

And with a single click we jump from 19^th century British poetry to 6^th century BC Chinese history. According to the random article presented, Duke Jing of Jin was the ruler of a state in ancient China.

It is with a little trepidation that I approach editing this article as I know nothing about the subject and a chunk of the references are in Chinese. However the basics were still there to be done, as there were a few grammar and wikilinking alterations required.

One edit that I made that doesn't show up on the displayed page is to the Short description template, changing it from "Ruler of the state of Jin" to "Ruler, state of Jin, China, c.6th BC ". Short descriptions are used for search results on Wikipedia mobile and some desktop searches and the idea is to keep then below 40 characters. If you haven't heard of Jin the current description is a bit limited so I dropped out some of the prepositions and definite articles and replaced them with time and place facts.

As usual the references required the most work. They were peppered with visible {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help) template errors. Rearranging the Cite_web references to use translator and author-link fields and moving the chapter details into the title field resolved these.

Finally the last reference was a big block of text in Chinese characters with no other information (discernible to me). Enter Google Translate, I simply copied & pasted and from the output it was obvious that the text was from one of the earlier references. Now an English translation could be provided from the webpage referred to and the rest of the details imported from the earlier reference. However the length of the quote is pretty huge and makes the references section look unbalanced.

So I think it needs to be presented as a separate footnote. Then the repeated references can be condensed into a single one. I didn't have the time to do this on the day I made the edits, so I had to save the work and return to it.

Footnotes are often presented separately from references; sometimes just to provide page details in works that are then given in a Reference or Bibliography section; sometimes they contain longer form explanatory content that is not easily included or required in the main body of the text. In both ways they are used like the footnotes found at the bottom of individual pages in a printed book. Wikipedia provides several ways to make footnotes and references, but as I want to separate the text from the Reference section I will use the {{efn}} and {{notelist}} template pair, making a separate Footnotes section to hold the text. It's still a vast block of text, but the result looks better at least and besides who'd want to miss the full details of the story of the ruler who died by drowning in his own privy?

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