Wikipedia talk:Parenthetical referencing/Archive 1

message: Your just sanctimonious, not improving the Harvard references page.
Here's my preparation for the 3RR (and don't think you're above that)
* Base version: 19:00
* First revert: 19:27
* Second revert: 19:49
* Third revert: 20:00
* Fourth revert: ... depends on you.
--Francis Schonken 20:13, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please stop it 

message: *"Writing with Sources: A Guide for Harvard Students" by Gordon Harvey, retrieved October 18, 2005
----
Tx! --Francis Schonken 21:14, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No objections have been voiced against this version of the project page since it was moved here for discussion, so moving this content to the project page. --Francis Schonken 11:13, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Further reading

message: I wouldn't consider Wikipedia:Footnote3 "some of the least useful templates we have on Wikipedia." There are over 150 articles using the system. Additionally, while footnote templating has deprecated, Harvard templates are still useful for creating "endnote" quicklinks to the footer and its reference in the text. The Footnote3 project page reads:
For linked Harvard references, realised with the  or  +  templates as explained below, this how-to guideline continues to be active.
Instead of deleting ref_harvard from this article altogether, I think it would make more sense to include it but mention that it is not an official policy. The footnotes procedures are constantly changing; see also Wikipedia talk:Footnotes and Wikipedia talk:Citing sources to keep up with the latest practices! --J. J. 20:36, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Ref_harvard should be mentioned

message: I started a discussion on adding clarity for nonacademics. Please see the citing references talk page. Maurreen 12:51, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Everyday audience and first names

message: I notice that the example has just been removed from this article (SlimVirgin's edit summary was "why would an article have both?").  I concede that the example is not as good as the example that is further up the Talk page, but it puzzles me that the article now has no examples at all.  Is it practical to work on improving the example in the Article page, or to do it in User space in a sandbox? 
To answer the question "why would an article have both?"  the Harvard reference would be to cite a source, while the footnote is text for disambiguation, further explanation, or to avoid over-simplification.  --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 10:36, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Can you clarify? SlimVirgin (talk) 11:32, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I meant, why was this example removed?diff --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 16:09, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed it because articles shouldn't mix up Harvard references and footnotes. I can't see why anyone would want to. If you want the author's name in the text, you can say "Smith (2005) argued that ..." What would the benefit be of having some citations in footnotes and others as Harvard references? SlimVirgin (talk) 16:12, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Example

message: I am fairly new to Wikipedia, so forgive me if it is unclear to me the status of this article.  Is it eligible for a  tag? --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 10:46, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Hrothulf, no it's not a proposed guideline. It's just a description of the way Harvard referencing's used in Wikipedia. SlimVirgin (talk) 11:30, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Status of article?

message: I just followed a link from Talk:Harvard referencing to get to this article. I say Yikes! Do we want two separate articles to cover the same info in two separate Wiki spaces? I say no, no, and no. I vote MERGE. I'm not gonna put merge tags on the articles just yet... will wait for comments. --Ling.Nut 13:45, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: One is an article in the encyclopedia; one is for the benefit of editors. Different audiences. SlimVirgin (talk) 16:13, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  MERGE: Two articles, different spaces, maintenance nightmare 

message: Folks,
I restored the changes I made earlier. Below are the reasons. If I miss some issue of interest to you, please ask me about it. 
1. Above here, Ling.Nut predicted that the existing structure of the HR and WP:HR articles would lead to a "maintenance nightmare". Just below that, SlimVirgin responded: "One is an article in the encyclopedia; one is for the benefit of editors. Different audiences." 
That response is incorrect or misleading. It implies that information must be duplicated in the two articles. That is incorrect. We can have two articles, for two audiences, with almost no duplication, therefore no maintenance nightmare. 
2. Above here, you will find SlimVirgin's statement that this article is "just a description of the way Harvard referencing's used in Wikipedia". 
That statement is misleading. It would be correct to say that this article "just describes some ways in which some WP writers have extended author-date for use in WP, with no justification from any well-known author-date guidebook, and with no debate in any open WP forum -- but possibly with very good reasons for extending author-date they way they extended it". 
3. Exactly what Ling.Nut predicted would happen -- given the old structure of information repeated in HR and WP:HR:, we had a maintenance nightmare. Prove it to yourself by looking at the two articles as they were on the last day of September, 2006. 
4. A little ways above here, SlimVirgin claimed that I was wrong in what I said about [hyper]linking in author-date. I asked for an example of the hyperlinking that I believe does not exist. SlimVirgin never replied. 
I think that SlimVirgin misunderstood the issue. Yes, references can be hyperlinked to sources. But what I said was that citations are not hyperlinked to references and Wikipedia provides no tools for a writer to hyperlink citations to references manually. This statement still appears correct to me. (But see extension #1 in the article for a work-around -- the writer can link straight from citation to source if source is online, and still provide a good author-date reference in References.)
5. A little ways above here, SlimVirgin said to me "some of your edits weren't correct". To me, "some" means "more than one" -- so I asked for a 2nd example. SlimVirgin never replied. 
That puts SlimVirgin at a count of zero for errors he or she has found in my earlier changes. 
So here's what I did: I restructured HR and WP:HR so that there are two articles, for two audiences, with almost no duplication, therefore no maintenance nightmare. I did that by putting, at the top of HR, a pointer to WP:HR, and at the top of WP:HR, a pointer to HR. HR is a base article about author-date in general. WP:HR discusses only WP-specific aspects of author-date. 
WP:HR is now easier to maintain not only because (a) it contains almost no duplication of info in HR, and (b) it is much smaller than it used to be. 
I also used author-date for all the citations and references in the article. SlimVirgain wanted to use a non-author-date style! Talk about confusing the reader! 
SlimVirgin wanted to use non-HR style for citations and references because it is "more commmon" in WP. This argument makes no sense. WP has no policy that says "editors must use the most common styles". If there is ever a place where we want to use author-date, I think it would be in an article on author-date.
I also gave examples showing how to integrate author-date with footnotes. As the discussion on this Talk page shows, that issue has been a source of great confusion for readers. 
6. SlimVirgin claimed that I made "too many changes". But that's what it took to remove the maintenance nightmare that the two articles had become. (Plus the multitude of little errors and omissions in giving the rules of author-date.) I believe it will take less time for concerned parties to see all these changes at once, rather than deal with them one at a time for weeks. 
7. Above here, you can see SlimVirgin's claim that "articles shouldn't mix up Harvard references and footnotes. I can't see why anyone would want to". I've discussed this issue above, but here I will try to make it clear: writers who use author-date for citations still need footnotes when they want to write a commentary on a detail issue that most readers might not be interested in; or when they want to provide a longer quote from a citation. 
By the way, I won't tolerate any nonsense from SlimVirgin. I'm not the first person who has run into SlimVirgin's obstructionism. See, for example, above, where SlimVirgin calls his or her changes "tidying", and another writer replies, "If we're going to compare mess, yours was worse, and far more wrong". I haven't examined that issues to see who I agree with, but given what I've seen of SlimVirgin's failure to respond to questions, failure to give reasons for changes, failure to remove multiple and significant errors and omissions from this article in which he or she takes such a proprietary interest, and opposition to others' efforts to fix those problems, I'd put my money on the other party. 
TH 21:27, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have almost no idea what you're talking about, but I will say this: regardless of anything that is happening in the real world, on Wikipedia, we are moving toward using footnotes in all articles. It isn't mandatory but it is happening. Therefore, if someone starts using footnotes for some comments in an article where the citations are given as Harvard refs, I guarantee that the whole article will be converted to footnotes. That is just a fact about Wikipedia, and this is a policy page about Wikipedia, so we're not going to pretend that articles use both Harvard refs and footnotes. Of course it's possible, and there's no rule against it, but I have never seen it, and I doubt they would last long if someone were to try it. If you think I am wrong, please produce some examples. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:46, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Sorry, I will try to be more constructive. Could you please list succinctly what you feel is wrong with the current version on the page? That'll help me to understand your concerns. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:54, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: My restoration

message: It is mentioned: "Linking to the article using an embedded link, like this. [1] Embedded links, like footnotes, are placed after punctuation." Nobody taught me this, but the following bindings have always been implicit to me:
* The '[1]' above should immediately follow the period (no leading space) because it binds to the sentence. The space disconnects it visually and syntactically.
* Embedded links, like footnotes, should be placed after the thing in question. If the reference modifies a sentence, it should follow the sentence' stop, as the stop is syntactically part of the sentence. If the reference modifies just a phrase, it should precede the phrase' stop; that is it should immediately follow the phrase itself, as the stops are parts of sentences and not of constituent phrases which sit amoung that syntax. Placing an embedded link or footnote after a stop is "too late" to modify that phrase as a new phrase has begun (and so, to me, visually and syntactically modifies nothing, or a null thing). Placing it after the full stop modifies the entire sentence, and if the link or footnote isn't for the entire sentence then it is misleading.
Christian Campbell 13:40, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disagreement about placing references w.r.t. punctuation 

message: LHOON, could you say what you mean by: "It also may be considered to put a too strong emphasis on the identity of the author and on the year of publication." Cheers, SlimVirgin (talk) 07:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say those are very personal views, LHOON. SlimVirgin (talk) 09:50, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: They are indeed, which does not mean they are not to be discussed about though! ;-)  LHOON 10:22, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  For LHOON 

message: There is a debate here over whether it is allowable to mix the Chicago and Harvard styles of referencing (like Saffron or Charles Darwin). The debate also concerns a seemingly unclear part of HARV, viz. the Templates section. Please join the discussion at WIAFA talk. Mikker (...) 02:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mixing Harvard and Chicago 

message: The web page referenced as ""Writing with Sources: A Guide for Harvard Students" by Gordon Harvey, retrieved October 18, 2005" in the references section is not fully functional. From the Internet Archive, it seems that the last fully functional version was http://web.archive.org/web/20060118054510/http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/. Jorge Peixoto 23:24, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad link 

message: Is there any fundamental technical or stylistic objection to having a program similar to Cite.php (or an option within Cite.php itself) that would generate Harvard references with an automatically alphabetized reference list (in Harvard style of course) and automatically generated links and backlinks between the references and the reference list? And if not—is it because Wikipedia is moving toward deprecation of Harvard references? (I would hope not!) —Neuromath 02:31, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cite.php technology for Harvard referencing? 

message: In the case of a single source being cited many, many times in one article Cite.php only allows for two results: Either a whole boatload of redundant lines under , or one huge citation line that has so many page numbers listed i1t is useless, and might even include almost every page in any entire book.  Template:Rp solves this (until Cite.php itself is made smarter, anyway), by enabling easy addition of Harvard-style page-number citations, such that the results look like: Alleged fact.[4]:18-9  The template discourages use where this is not necessary, of course.  If a reference is only cited 4 times in an article,  is not called for.  NB: The point of this is also that  is incredibly tedious and error-prone under these specific circumstances (though otherwise useful in other circumstances).  Try using  50 times in the same article to cite different pages in the same source and you'll see what I mean.  Even remembering what ID to use is pretty much impossible after a while, and soon becomes an out-of-order mess, because the ID numbers do not auto-reorganize if material is moved around, as it often is. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:31, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: PS: See Talk:Glossary of cue sports terms/Archive 3#The page number problem for the "origin story". — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:43, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I like the effect of Harvard references but I dislike the complexity of the templates and named references.  I have come to use a simple ref tag with the information of a Harvard reference inside the tag, e.g. For quotation from Doe, see: Foo (1923), p. 18. Is there a way to use the Harvard citation templates without using named references, which I find hard to maintain? Buddhipriya 01:49, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: New "add-on" template for citing page numbers in Harvard style with Cite.php

message: The article currently says, "Et al. (an abbreviation of et alii which means "and others.") should be italicised as it is Latin; foreign languages are usually italicised in writing [5]"
It's true that italicization of et al is often enough house style or project style in publishing, although sometimes (especially in the medical profession) it is often forgone as being unnecessary and somewhat hypercorrective. The term is so well known and so frequently repeated that it is considered as naturalized into English and no longer "foreign". A similar process happens with many foreign borrowings if they become naturalized enough to be considered no longer "foreign". For example, it's a bit silly to italicize the words cliché or dénouement in English, because they have been naturalized. However, I am not going to try to change the current Wikipedia SOP, because (a) italicization of et al is indeed often enough house style or project style in publishing, and (b) it's silly to proselytize against it. I just wanted to point out here on the talk page, for the record, that it is sometimes considered unnecessary and hypercorrective. — Lumbercutter 18:13, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Italicizing "et al." because "foreign": This is perfectly OK, but sometimes considered hypercorrective

message: Main reason is that parenthetical covers author-title systems as well as author-date, and is more descriptive (and thus well-known) than Harvard referencing. Objections were raised to Harvard ref. by several people, myself included, as it is not as well-known of a term. Main discussion over at Talk:Author-date referencing. II  04:19, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Move to parenthetical referencing

message: In decipherment of rongorongo, which is up for FAC, there are several section which deal with specific authors. Most of the subsections of the last of these, on Pozdniakov, is taken entirely from two papers written in different years by the same author. For inline citations, do I really need to say "(Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov 2007:xx)" each time (this occurs several times per paragraph), or, after the works are established, can I abbreviate to "(2007:xx)" or "(P&P 2007:xx)"? Most reviewers haven't said anything, but yesterday one objected to this as being a violation of the MoS. kwami (talk) 20:33, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  repetitions