Talk:Schuylkill Canal

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[edit] Plans

I've been working on the whole system of Pennsylvania canals, of which the Schuylkill Canal was an important part. I created a Pennsylvania Canal page a couple of days ago; it has a complete list of the public and private canals in the state. My long-range goal is to write articles for each of the missing pieces. Some of the bigger pieces such as the Main Line of Public Works and the Pennsylvania Canal (Delaware Division) and this article about the Schuylkill Canal were already done by others, and I've done a couple of the missing bigger pieces like the Beaver and Erie Canal and one little piece, the Leiper Canal. The remaining pieces are mostly small, but they are intended to complete the larger picture. I'm being careful to cite sources for any data that I include in these articles. Please add more details if you have reliable sources.

[edit] Sources

The Schuylkill Canal article as I found it was completely unsourced except for the National Register citation. I'd like to add citations for the material I have sources for, but my main source, The Amazing Pennsylvania Canals, by William H. Shank, doesn't agree in every detail with what's already in the article. For example, my source says that the tunnel at Auburn was completed in 1821, whereas the existing article says 1824. If I use my source, I have to change the date to 1821. Does anyone interested in this page object if I make this and similar changes if I back them up with sources? Alternatively, can you provide sources for the existing data? Not every sentence of every article needs to be sourced, but quantities, dates, and facts that might reasonably be questioned or doubted should be sourced to some reliable entity. Most of the data in the 1821 or 1824 paragraph is supported by Shank, and I could cite him once for the whole paragraph if I make a few minor changes. Any thoughts? Objections? Counter-proposals? Finetooth 20:22, 12 November 2007 (UTC)