User:Jc3s5h/Boracay Bill on references

Short footnotes with "Reference" section

Thanks for responding to my questions in Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Short footnotes with "Reference" section. I have tried out your suggestions in User: Gerry Ashton/Harvard citation and have extended them slightly in User: Gerry Ashton/Note citation. They seem to work quite well, but if this were to be done more widely, we would have to find a way to educate users, because the methods are intimidating at first glance. If you care to glance at my examples to see if I did what you intended, your comments would be welcome. (The large vertical spaces in my examples are so I can easily see if the links are taking me where I want them to.)

Also, your response didn't address the fact that you suggested using the Citation template in the reference list, but most style guides suggest using periods to separate reference elements, while the Citation template uses commas. Is it actually necessary to use the Citation template, or would Cite book, Cite journal, etc. work just as well? (signature redacted)

{{Cite book}} supports a ref= (lowercase 'r') parameter. Some other {{Cite ...}} templates support a similar parameter and some don't. Support for this may or may not be documented -- you might need to look at the template source code to find it. I tend to use {{Citation}} because it is flexible enough to use for citing books, journals, web pages, newspapers, chapters in books, patents, and other stuff and does support an ID'd <CITE> tag. If the citation formats produced by the various templates are ever regularized, the regularization will apply to all of my template-based citations, while hand-formatted citations which aren't in step with the regularization will stay out of step. It's pretty easy to create formatting templates similar to existing ones but with a couple of minor formatting changes, but we've got too many alternative templates to do the same job in twenty slightly-different ways as it is. It might not be too difficult to modify {{Citation}} (IMO the most generally useful one) to take an additional optional argument like style=CMS to set items like separator chars according to a particular style. Changing the order of the various citation components according to various style guides would likely be more difficult.

I expect to run into a problem myself at some point with features missing from {{Cite ...}} and {{Citation}}. {{Citation}} provides good support for citing chapters in a book which {{Cite book}} lacks. {{Cite web}} provides good support for citing web pages which have gone dead but which have copies available in online archives which {{Citation}} and {{Cite book}} lack. examples:

• Veltisezar Bautista, "3. The Philippine Revolution (1896-1898)", The Filipino Americans (1763-Present): Their History, Culture and Traditions (2nd ed.), ISBN 0-931613-17-5
• "Philippines Aims to Boost Growth by 2009". forbes.com. Archived from the original on 2007-02-20. Retrieved 2008-01-09. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; 2007-02-22 suggested (help)

That's all well and good, but when I run into a book with dead URLs for its online info and for online chapter text and with the dead link content available from an archive, I'm going to need to figure out a way to deal with that. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 08:27, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

One other thing

<ref>{{Ref harvard|Castro|Castro 1998:45|1998|noid=noid}}</ref>

produces approximately the same stuff in the <References /> list as

<ref>([[#CITECastro1998|Castro 1998:45]])</ref>

( (Castro 1998:45) vs. (Castro 1998:45) ), except that it produces a link to Endnote_Castro1998 instead of CITECastro1998, and that might be a bit less cryptic and is susceptible to citation format regularization via template regularization if such a thing ever occurs. If you do use that, please do not leave out the noid=noid parameter as that avoids a generally benign but nonetheless illegal (x)html error. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 12:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)