Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Archive 6

message: I'd like to make a move to start recommending footnotes more strongly and to select one (probably not more than one?) footnote system from the candidate systems in existence.   I've made a proposal at Wikipedia:Footnote3 for a fully automatically numbered footnote system.  I think this is good enough.
At the same time, I actually want to put a strong support for footnotes as a form of source citing.  We are not writing academic papers; our audience is more or less "the man on the street".  This should include those who are not expert readers for many reasons (e.g. didn't learn till recently; don't get much chance to practice not having access to books; are non native speakers; have learning difficulties).  Numbered footnotes are used in "normal" books (if anything) for the simple reason that they do not interrupt reading.   If we want to allow easy checking of who said what, then later we can allow the link title to be altered with a change to mediawiki.  In my footnote system (which uses names to link from reference to note) that will be possible automatically just by altering the template. Mozzerati 08:33, 2005 Feb 20 (UTC)
:And more to the point, the suggestion in the article that foot/endnotes are discouraged in scientific writing is far from universally true.  Nearly all Computer Science papers that I have ever seen use either numbered or symbolic ("[LMKQ89]") endnote references, and very rarely cite specific page numbers for individual quotations (perhaps because most of the work in this field is in the form of papers rather than monstergraphs).  The deprecation of footnotes in some branches of academe seems, from the proffered reasons, to mainly be a hundred-year-delayed reaction to the difficulty of doing some things on a typewriter; we have long understood that, well, "that's what we have computers for".  Moving reference information to footnotes or endnotes (in WP they are effectively indistinguishable) is just good common sense; we should not discourage it on the grounds that some academic style guides haven't yet escaped from the 1970s.  (How recently was it that APA said it was acceptable to use italics for book titles instead of underlining?)
:I should mention, by the way, that in Computer Science papers it is also standard practice to place notes in bibliographic, rather than citation, order, so the first citation in a paper might well be "[17]".  18.26.0.18 23:03, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Footnotes

message: Wikipedia:References has not been updated for almost a year and is mostly forgotten - it should be merged here and made into a redirect, would you agree? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 19:23, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: it's completely obsolete having been superceeded by Wikipedia:Footnotes Wikipedia:Footnote2 and Wikipedia:Footnote3.  Although none of these has become policy, it's clear to me that direct external links are a bad idea since it's impossible to tell what they are supposed to refer to if the content at the other end of the link gets changed.  I think that little of the material should be moved elsewhere.  Probably it should just be marked as obsolete.  Mozzerati 20:17, 2005 Mar 30 (UTC)
Wikipedia:References makes sense to me. Having read through the first and skimmed the second two, I still have no idea what those three things are, and why there are three. Hyacinth 20:59, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Good point.  The Footnote* articles are based around new technologies and are intended to replace some References material.  The Footnote* tools have not been completed, and the discussion has been focused on techniques and usage, so the pages are describing trees without giving an overview of forest for casual readers. (SEWilco 03:50, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge 

message: Suggestion: It would be nice if we could partially automate citations and references for books and other materials with an ISBN by providing a template something like {cite:<isbn number>} and {ref:<isbn number>}, that would be expanded at page-request time. Ignoring for the moment how the data would be stored, such a citation or reference would fetch the data and insert it into the HTML whenever a page containing it is requested.
The reason I suggest this partly for ease of providing good citations, but also so that corrections to a book's bibliographic info could be made in a centralized place, and we could start getting away from the incorrect/incomplete references scattered all over Wikipedia that are very labor-intensive to track down and fix. (We want good citations for our articles, right?)
Some thought needs to go into the mechanism, but here are some conversation-starter thoughts. Clearly the links can't be autogenerated if no one has entered the data, so presumably the data would reside on a special class of page containing the bib info for that ISBN. Ideally the citations and references would contain not only the text extracted from that page, but also link to it as an article about the book, so that interested parties could find out more about the source as a book, if there is anything to say about it beyond its publication data.
However, that simple scheme is complicated by the fact that some books have multiple editions with different ISBNs. That should be addressable in a straightforward manner if we had the ISBN citation repository, because then an article about a book could just {ref:<isbn number>} in a "Known editions" section. What we would need for going in the other direction is an article name somewhere in the ISBN citation repository, so that you can find the article about the book (if one exists) from the ISBN.
Of course, the automagically generated reference could still include the ISBN as an anchor for a link to the book-search stuff we have now; presumably it would be the title of the book within the reference that would link to the article (if any) about the book. Also, it would be nice if the {cite:blah} and {ref:blah} in an article simply didn't show up if the necessary data hadn't been entered; that might encourage people to cite sources that they wouldn't bother with if they had to do more than flip the book over and look at the ISBN.
At any rate, don't let the implementation issues distract from the basic desirability of having the publication data about a book stored only in a single place so that it is easy to maintain, plus an automated system for fetching that data into other articles as formal citations and references. — B.Bryant 01:06, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Automating citations and references 

message: Please see my comment/question above in 10 Article titles in quotes.  — Emerman 15:45, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question added 

message: I know that the APA and MLA styles are the most famous and preferred in most academic circles, but I'm not too fond of them. I've always found the ordering of infomation to be awkward. I prefer listing the title first. Is there an official, notable style that uses this format? I don't want to cite sources with the title first only for my style to be considered "irregular" and changed to APA style later. I would rather just use a notable "regular" (if perhaps uncommon) citation style to begin with. If there is no viable alternative, then I will use AMA--but surely there must be an alternative.... - Pioneer-12 13:12, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think everyone has a preferred citation style of their own; it's likely to be difficult to come to any sort of global WP consensus because disciplines vary as to preferred styles, and many parts of WP aren't really the subject of formal study.  There looks to be talk about providing a BibTeX-like citation system, where this could be made a matter of user preference.  (I generally prefer "plain.btx" style myself.)  Being flexible in this regard also makes contributing much less daunting to non-mavens; there are far too many policies and unofficial conventions as it is.  So long as all the necessary information is there, people should not complain about citation style (and should only change the citation style if it is inconsistent or incomplete, not because it doesn't conform to the style guide they used in school).  18.26.0.18 23:27, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Alternate citation style?

message: Is there a template we could put on pages without reference information and/or a Category for such pages? I think this is one of the biggest problems on Wikipedia and unfortunately one that isn't treated with sufficient vigiliance. Also, if it is decided to approach the problem like this, there should also be a way to make sure only "important" topics, i.e. ones that have a decent amount of literature, receive this sort of attention otherwise it will be a pointless endeavour. --Tothebarricades.tk 20:51, May 4, 2005 (UTC)
::Template:Unreferenced and :Category:Articles which lack sources (which replaced the earlier :Template:Cite sources and :Category:Missing citations). —Steven G. Johnson 04:42, May 5, 2005 (UTC)
:This page isn't the place for extensive discussion of this (which has occurred several times, elsewhere), but the real issue isn't simply whether an article "has sources" but whether particular statements are sourced. If someone just goes and slaps a few references onto an existing article, it still doesn't really let us know what facts in the article actually are sourced. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:40, May 5, 2005 (UTC)
:Not that slapping ugly templates on a article will make the fundamental problem any better. Pcb21| Pete 08:52, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Organization of pages without sources