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I just took an editing pass over some of the recent additions to the article. In my opinion, we are adding too much detail about activities that are not directly related to the battle that occurred on April 9. I think it would be more appropriate to move most of the voluminous material (actually, a lot of detail has been omitted even from this lengthy description) about prior battles, surrender negotiations, and the following surrender ceremonies to the currently brief [[Appomattox Campaign]] article. It is on my [[User:Hlj#todobattles|to-do list]] to expand the campaign article and, unless someone beats me to it, I think this particular battle article should be focused much more sharply on the battle itself. [[User:Hlj|Hal Jespersen]] ([[User talk:Hlj|talk]]) 00:13, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
:It was my intent to just add more information, and worry about trimming later; it's a lot easier than having to go back. I don't have access to the sources I need to expand the rest of it at this time. I don't think it makes much sense to redirect the surrender info to the Appomattox Campaign article, because I doubt even once it's been expanded it will be that large. It makes much more sense to just discuss the natural outgrowth of the day's fighting here, because it's more directly relevant than the campaign in general. Also, I would like to know why you are reverting formatting changes. [[User:Martin Raybourne|Martin Raybourne]] ([[User talk:Martin Raybourne|talk]]) 18:30, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
The reason it makes more sense in the campaign article is that the prelude to surrender--all of the notes and responses and preparations to meet between the lines at various times--coincided with the results of three or four individual battles. Therefore, putting it all into the article about the minor battle that preceded the surrender, relying on a very long Background section to cover all of that information seems less than optimal. On a procedural note, I think you will find over time that writing articles and then going back later to add citation is actually more work. The first few hundred articles I wrote were in the early days of Wikipedia, when citations were not emphasized as being very important, and going back to improve those with reasonable citations has been a ''lot'' of work, which is not nearly complete after over five years.
I modified the formatting to match the formatting used by the original author of the work and of other comparable articles in the campaign and the American Civil War space. One of the tenets of Wikipedia editing is that if multiple formats are allowable, when you make incremental edits to an article you do not arbitrarily change them to another format, you conform to the format already in place. [[User:Hlj|Hal Jespersen]] ([[User talk:Hlj|talk]]) 22:45, 26 September 2009 (UTC)
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