Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (footnotes)/Archive 2

message: Here are the ways in which this system can get screwed up, and how to fix it when they happen.
:More footnotes than references, or vice versa.
:: First, identify if this is a numbering problem, or an actual content problem.
:: Count the number of instances of {{an| in the wikitext, and make sure that is the same as the number of {{anb| lines in the references section.
:: If they don't match, then it's a content problem, otherwise, it's a numbering problem.
:: For numbering problems, look for the regexp \[\[[^\] ]+\]\], i.e. straight numbered external links, and add descriptive text to them(which is good style anyway).  Then make sure all the {{anb| lines begin with #.  Then, click on each of the back links, and re-order the ref section to reflect them.  That will fix numbering problems.
:: Content problems need to be fixed by looking adding or removing footnotes.
Feel free to add more, or move this to the main page. JesseW 06:41, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible degenerate cases for this system and how to work around them 

message: If you thought the papal page had many footnotes, please have a look at Race and intelligence. Since we are trying to polish that article, I started to go through the references, but was frustrated after a few edits. 
Currently, the references to articles are in two clusters: in the footnotes, and in the References section. I want to clean this up. But how?
As you can see, there are quite a few references in the body text to the same journal article, for example to Neisser et al. (1996). Currently, some of them are external links in the body text, some of them are footnotes, and some of them are Author (Year) citations that match an entry in the References section. 
If I follow the guidelines, it seems that the best cause of action is to have these things all be footnotes (different ones, for sure), and then let the footnote text by of the form
: Neisser et al. (1996)
From there, the reader can then manually go through the References section to finally recover the article. Currently, the second footnote is an example of this style (the reference itself is in the Introduction). Following this cause of action, all referenced works would turn up in the References section, and the Notes section would consist mainly of very short footnote texts like the above. This is markedly different from what has been done in the Pope's article, where the Notes section contains all the referenced works. Am I misunderstanding something? Arbor 14:25, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Egads! This article has a separate page just for its references, plus a pile of footnotes! -- Beland 04:28, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Race and intelligence]] 

message: ::::: Are you qualifying your "dead links are likely to stay dead" with a restriction to "web citations"?  Citations in References often are to sources other than web sites, and a full citation should allow a chance of finding the source even if an online link goes dead. (SEWilco 8 July 2005 08:46 (UTC))
::::::I'm not sure exactly what you are saying here, but to clarify, I mean that in the case of materials which are only found online, having a full citation of the form provided by  probably is only going to help in relatively small fraction of the cases after the link goes dead.  Which is to say that online materials have a tendency to either exist or not.  In my experience, it is less common for material (at least of the sort worthy of referencing) to have broken links simply because it were moved, or to be able to find alternative copies at other locations.  Dragons flight July 8, 2005 18:11 (UTC)
::::::: Yes, by definition materials which are only found online are less likely to be available once they are removed.  A link to the materials may go dead for several reasons; a site reorganization may move material to a new URL and it can be rediscovered with a site search, while a deletion of material causes loss of material unless there are other copies online or archives.  One of the differences between an inline link and a "web reference" template is the template contains dates which may make it easier to find an archive of when material did exist (searching WP History to find the date of an edit can be awkward).  (SEWilco 8 July 2005 18:52 (UTC))
There are an increasing number of archives (way back machine, etc) that attempt to archive EVERYTHING on the web at various points in time. Please don't AUTOMATICALLY delete dead links as they can be used in these archives even if not on the Live web. The main problem with references is people don't supply them and when they ARE supplied in the text they are moved to the bottom in an external link section, disconnected with what they are providing evidence for, someone deletes them because "Wikipedia is not a link directory", then the data gets deleted or altered for lack of an evidence trail. 4.250.138.208 07:10, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: What you describe as the "main problem" seems to describe some types of edits which people may do to text (containing links or otherwise) for various reasons.  Wrapping an external link within a citation which has footnotes pointing to the citation establishes the connection between what you describe as "text" and "evidence", and establishing the citation as belonging within a References/Notes section will discourage its further movement.  (SEWilco 07:59, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

text: In case you're referring to previous mention of it, the SEWilcoBot citation bot does not automatically delete anything.  It does move around unreferenced citations and may indicate if a link is dead.  (SEWilco 07:59, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead link reference 

message: I too like inline links. Also, the ref format does odd things when you are looking at page diffs! William M. Connolley 2005-07-07 08:47:14 (UTC).
: What "odd things" are you seeing on page diffs? (SEWilco 7 July 2005 17:42 (UTC))
:: If you click on them, you end up back on the current version of the page, which... doesn't have the refs on. William M. Connolley 2005-07-07 18:08:27 (UTC).
::: Oh, you're clicking within a past version, not looking at a diff.  I see that a  link in a diff page contains a version qualifier, although the  link does not include a version qualifier.  Something apparently is different in the processing of ref and note.  (SEWilco 8 July 2005 08:46 (UTC))
:::: Bug 2781 filed.  (SEWilco 06:56, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ref/Note links in old article versions 

message: I started this whole footnote revolution with Footnote2. To be honest, I don't really care how things are cited, so long as they are. I use WikiBib to cite everything (that is what I made it for). I think it is most important to turn external links into citations. Why? Because Wikipedia is above all else an encyclopedia, and a bulleted list of plain and uninformative links is irresponsible. We need to provide the reader with the author of the page, the actual title of the page, the copyright of the page and the day that we accessed the page. There are 1.3 million external links on Wikipedia, and tens of thousands of them are broken. There exists no meta-data surrounding them with which to judge their merit. Is it worth it to check archive.org for each one? When was it entered into the article? There is no easy way to find out.
Ideally, Wikipedia would use an intermediate citation format and users could choose which style they would like to see. Those handy with PHP have shown, however, that they probably aren't too interested in implementing something like this. That said, I object to any sort of a bot standardizing references (unless it is adding meta-data to otherwise plain external links). No formalized way of displaying data is superior over any other way. It is and always will be a preference unto each person  --Alterego 02:58, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
: I agree more metadata is necessary, and is one goal of several projects.  The mentioned bot is intended to improve the quality of the citation descriptions, and the present "Title" extraction is only a first version:  User:SEWilcoBot#Citations bot  Presentation of the information can be expected to vary as the software and user interfaces are changed, and the preceding discussion is only about presentation.   (SEWilco 06:13, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A partial solution to the dead link problem is Wikipedia:Dead external links. -- Beland 04:28, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to cite sources? 

message: Does anyone have an idea why the auto-numbering goes for a toss, when I use it inside images? See the image under Economy_of_India#Mixed_Economy, which shows it as 2, while it links to the footnote numbered 3. I think it maybe be a mediawiki bug.  I am already using Wikipedia:Footnote4 for templates, hence I am using this for footnotes. pamri 10:58, July 18, 2005 (UTC)
:Your notes are out of order. In the text, they're in the following order: ref|pce-village, ref|sachart-bangladesh, ref|sector-emply-chart, ref|rti-example. In the notes section, they're in the following order: note|pce-village, note|rti-example, note|sector-emply-chart, note|sachart-bangladesh. Rearrange the notes in the same order as the "refs" and all should be well. —Wayward 11:27, July 18, 2005 (UTC)
:Thanks for the reply. But it's hopelessly screwed up now after I arranged it in the correct order. pamri 13:51, July 18, 2005 (UTC)
:Sorry, I can't figure out what's throwing them out of whack. The notes are in the right order, they all link correctly, yet they're numbered 3, 1, 2, 4, respectively. Just to test, I went to another article with notes and added a new note to a picture; it worked correctly. —Wayward 07:27, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
:I've rearranged the notes so at least the numbers match. —Wayward 07:41, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
:Thanks. What do you think of this method (look for  (Ch.4, pg.63-67 Nehru (1946))); using Harvard referencing instead of manual numbering. I can then replace ref/note with manual numbering. pamri 07:53, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
::I recommend you use the standard author-date system for text citation, which would look like this: (Nehru 1946, 63–67). There is no need for text references and footnotes. —Wayward 08:25, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
: The problems with that article are due to external links in templates, which are confusing the sequences of footnotes.  (SEWilco 04:06, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using footnotes under images 

message: Before we assume vandalism, let's assume good faith.  Steven has perhaps not been following the various citation discussions and this discussion has been going on for a while, so maybe he missed the earlier discussions.
Footnote3 has been publicised; 
* on the discussion page of cite sources
* on the village pump
* on each preceding footnote page (Wikipedia:Footnote, Wikipedia:Footnote2)
* in relevant different projects (Fact and reference check)
* in discussion on the featured articles page and it's talk page
* etc.
A large number of earlier concerns have been addressed by many people.  Saying that this has not been widely discussed seems incorrect to me.  Mozzerati 09:34, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Please give a reference who would have said this had not been widely discussed? --Francis Schonken 06:41, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

text: I think the mention of how widely this has been discussed are due to the above comment that this was produced by footnote fans in isolation of other citation participants.  I don't think that is the case; when I was looking for citation formats I found the Footnote discussions and ended up here.  There haven't been many participants in discussions about citations, so it is hard to judge how much of a community exists and how many are involved where.  (SEWilco 16:25, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Footnote3 has been discussed and this is the correct place. 

message: I got fed up of coming here to copy the following:
 
every time I wanted to put some footnotes into an article, so I've created a template to do it.  Just type  into the edit box and it'll be pasted in for you.
CTOAGN 22:55, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Template:Footnote3text 

message: There is a discussion about reference styles taking place at Talk:Solar variation#Referencing, where Footnote3 has been used since March.  (SEWilco 17:51, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Solar variation discussion 

message: Comments requested at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Inline links discouraged in favor of more complete sources. (SEWilco 08:04, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inline links discouraged in favor of more complete sources 

message: I'm a new user (but an experienced technical worker with a brain too small to be willing to learn more about things than I'm forced to), and I had real problems understanding this article.  So I clarified both to help other new users -- maybe more editors will actually use the article in the future -- and also to help me when I've forgotten all I know now and need to consult the article again.
But I did NOT clarify the latter parts of the article, which I don't begin to understand.  Based on experience, I can quickly just ignore them without trying to understand them.  I'll leave a note on SEWilco's talk page that I think someone needs to move some of this text to footnotes or the talk page, if we Wikipedians put value on having clean guideline articles.  Also I don't know how to fix the box in Helping editors unfamiliar with footnote templates.  Not that I'll bother using that box anyhow.
However I will continue to use both template pairs, "ref/note" and "ref label/note label", which I like and which are sturdy enough to work well.  The latter pair even work for travel just within the Footnotes section itself, which is how I myself will do all my future multiple uses of the same footnote, if any.  See the article itself.  To insert a footnote, I did have trouble using the templates correctly in the presence of a fixed, out of sequence footnote, last night (Sunday night) when Wikipedia was so slow I gave up on Previews and just did Save pages.  But this morning, my brain works normally again and so does WP so I could do it just fine, a piece of cake.  For7thGen 19:05, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Insert a footnote, add an example, and add clarity I hope 

message: Narrating my experience may be helpful.  When I was doing the above work on clarity I needed to insert 2 new references to the same footnote [2].  I had the unpleasant experience of finding the old references that needed to be changed, buried in a long article, in order to maintain them.  This unpleasant burden gave rise to the idea of multiple references only within the footnotes section, to avoid this worst part of their maintenance task.
Thus, the above-mentioned inserting a footnote and example to show the within-Footnotes referencing.  For7thGen 20:15, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Multiple references to the same footnote

message: A straw poll is being taken based on whether using only URLs in an article is an acceptable style for citing sources instead of having more detailed citations.  See Talk:Global cooling#SEWilco.2C disruptive reverts.2C and citations.  (SEWilco 23:45, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Vsmith is presenting a misleading view of the situation, where the original article had dead URL-only links with numbered format, being replaced with standard Wikipedia:Footnote numbered links to citations.  See the discussion in Talk:Global cooling, and if you wish see Vsmith's alternative whose errors and weaknesses are described in Talk:Kyoto Protocol.  While he complains of consensus, Vsmith's edit is even more dramatic a style change than numbered links.  (SEWilco 05:59, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are URL-only links an acceptable citation style? 

message: I'd actually like to examine whether we really want to use Ibid as a reference. Not many readers know what it means, and some style manuals have deprecated it (mostly because they use Harvard references, which don't need to be duplicated). The second link from Ibid mentions that it is used in "older articles". I'd suggest that we don't use Ibid on Wikipedia for the same reason that we avoid other unnecessary Latin.
What I'd suggest, instead, is using a brief version of the previous reference, such as the author's last name, or one or two words of the title if that doesn't work. (The Chicago Manual of Style uses this in some cases.) I've just changed Xanadu House to do this, and I think it's much more understandable. Should we add this as a style guideline? rspeer 05:38, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: When referring to a preceding citation, SEWilcoBot is oriented toward using the title with "(See above)" linked to a previous citation.  I avoided "Ibid" due implications of its meaning, and to avoid problems due to a new citation being inserted between the original and where "Ibid" may have been used.  (SEWilco 06:02, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ibid 

message: * Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#Citation format poll: Format of citations and WP:V examples.
** This includes a question on whether WP:FN is to be considered a guideline. (SEWilco 06:51, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  WP:V citations 

message: User:SlimVirgin recently modified the page to make it more consistent with other policies and style guides. User:SEWilco almost immedialtely reverted calling the edit POV. I have reverted back as the points addressed are important and I cannot see a supposed POV problem. Perhaps SEWilco feels this is his personal project and doesn't like modification and clarification by others, I don't know. Anyway, discuss the changes, don't just revert. Vsmith 17:44, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Vsmith. I tried to bring the page into line with WP:V and WP:CITE. Both make clear that numbered embedded links and Harvard referencing are acceptable as citation styles too. This page gave the impression that numbered embedded links were not acceptable. SlimVirgin (talk) 18:07, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent revisions and revert 

message: I'm not sure if this is exactly the place to raise this niggle, but all here seem to be hard at work on footnotes, so here goes:
I know it might seem petty, but I find the increase in line spacing that linked-footnote superscripts create detracts from Wikipedia's otherwise generally very good presentation. Using unlinked footnote/subscript characters from a font (like this: ¹  [described by my Windows XP Character Map program as character U+00B9]) doesn't alter the line spacing. Can Wikipedia's linked footnote subscripts be made to behave similarly?  I would offer to program whatever changes would be necessary, but know I don't have the know-how. Would anyone who does be up for sorting this out?  I'd be happy to help if there's some way I can.
Thanks, David Kernow 23:48, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Look up the AUTOINCREMENT fix (there presently is a link to the discussion in the ToDo list at the top of this page).  As it produces sequence numbers, you may be able to track from there what causes the actual characters to be emitted.  (SEWilco 04:15, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Current linked-footnote superscripts foul up line spacing 

message: I don't know how much longer I can participate.  The Arbitration Committee, in violation of Wikipedia policies and Arbiration policy, dragged me into a farce of a case and now placed me on Probation and forbidden me from following policy Wikipedia:Verifiability and improving citations.    Another example of the need for Wikipedia:User Bill of Rights so we know the rules and arbitration actions are limited. (SEWilco 20:33, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arbitration Committee is crazy 

message: I repeat my  proposal above (well, some months ago) to use following template on wikipedia:footnotes as a replacement for the  template:
	This page is a how-to guideline for Wikipedia, reflecting how the authors of this encyclopedia address certain issues. This guideline is intended to help you improve Wikipedia content. Feel free to update this page as needed, but please use the discussion page to propose major changes.

Why do I propose this now?
* A major objection against Wikipedia:footnotes (unsupported conversion of citation styles by certain bots) has been lifted today (see Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Climate_change_dispute_2#SEWilco.27s_conversion_of_citations);
* Wikipedia:footnotes is presently categorised in :category:wikipedia how-to, which is a wikipedia guidelines subcategory; it is for such use that the template proposed above (the ) was designed.
Does anyone oppose the use of that template?
:and/or
Should we list this again on wikipedia:current surveys or wikipedia:village pump (policy) or any other similar place?
--Francis Schonken 22:34, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "How-to guideline" template