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Talk:Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur

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Two questions about fitting this article into standard format

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I gave this article an infobox since the academic journals seem to benefit from them, but this journal is never referred to by a string of shortened versions of the title words; it's always ZfdA, even on the publisher's page. Is there anywhere in the infobox where this can be included? If not, I'm inclined to just leave that infobox line blank. This is not a medical journal and that abbrev. is not going to find it in bibliographies; it's misleading. Also, like most academic journals I use, it's numbered in annual volumes (and was published annually except for World War II and its immediate aftermath, I believe), but currently comes out in quarterly issues. Does that make it an annual or a quarterly? Yngvadottir (talk) 12:06, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Hi, to start with the last, as frequency of publication we (i.e. at the WPJournals project) take the number of issues appearing in a year. The vast majority of journals publish one volume yearly, but with monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly issues (or some other frequency). The only publisher that regularly publishes more volumes per year, to my knowledge, is Elsevier, generally for journals that publish more than 12 issues/year. ISO4 abbreviations are not just for scientific journals, but for all academic journals. ISO is an international standard, and many libraries and such follow it. As ZfdA is given directly at the start of the article in the lead, I don't don't think that it is a big problem giving the ISO4 abbreviation in the infobox. --Randykitty (talk) 12:33, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • The problem with that abbreviation is, it's misleading because I don't believe it's ever used! The German journals all or almost all have traditional abbreviations (of which the weirdest is PBB); bibliographies all use these. I'd really rather leave that line out; I think what I'll do with my next edit (I have another source to weave in when I get home from work) is include the actual abbrev. in parenthese after the name at the top of the infobox and blank the abbrev. line. Anyone wanting it can derive it from the official list of abbreviations for words, but I've honestly never seen it used. Even on OCLC. The same problem is going to arise for ZfdPh. I'll leave it as quarterly, then, although that's really subordinate to the volume numbering and hasn't always been that way. But yes, a large number of journals do it that way now. --Yngvadottir (talk) 13:18, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sorry, but I don't think it should be removed. Acronyms are very misleading (for example, when you say PBB, I think Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior). The ISO abbreviation is an international standard, used by PubMed (biomedical) and the Library of Congress (everything), for example (unfortunately, we can't check the entry for this journal in the LC catalog, because it is down due to the government shutdown there). Neither do I think that it is a good idea to put the acronym in the title of the infobox, that field is for the title of the journal. Would it help if the abbreviation in the lead were bolded? As for deriving the abbreviation: an acronym is way easier to derive than the ISO abbreviation for a German title. For the first, you only need to be able to read, for the latter, you have to do some serious searching... :-) --Randykitty (talk) 13:43, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • A Google search shows it being used by Pubmed and some indexes in Korean (?) and Japanese (?). If you Google ZfdA, on the other hand ... and notice that the OCLC listing you plugged in (which is one of several, hence why I didn't put in an OCLC number) has ZfdA after the title. The gobbledygook returns 2 OCLC entries; ZfdA returns several. I think we have a problem here; both need to be in the infobox if the gobbledygook is, and I can see the rationale for including the latter since medical journals are apparently indexing it this way. The best solution would be to add a line in the infobox for common abbreviation. Is that feasible? I will bold it in the text, since I created a redirect for it ... but I don't think that's enough. That gobbledygook thing is seriously misleading if left standing alone as "the abbreviation" for this journal. It simply isn't used by those who read this journal (as the OCLC results demonstrate - those are from what librarians have entered.) Yngvadottir (talk) 18:04, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I really don't think that the infobox is misleading, it clearly says that it's the ISO4 abbreviation, which is an international standard, just like the ISSN (and like the ISSN really not only for medical journals). The lead then very clearly gives the colloquial abbreviation. WorldCat is a mess, it usually returns several OCLC numbers for any given journal, because of small (or sometimes rather large) variations in library catalogs (which are indeed not a very reliable source on anything, I have found). I simply plug in the OCLC that you get when clicking on the ISSN link... --Randykitty (talk) 18:16, 13 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is one of the classes of article where I find an infobox useful. But if the infobox is going to give an abbreviation, it should give the one that is actually used in relevant bibliographies! Otherwise it overrides anything the lead paragraph says: that is the nature of infoboxes. So I really hope the folks at the relevant page will let us have both. The ISO4 is undoubtedly a great thing in medicine and so forth, so I see why it's been programmed in ... but in Germanic studies ... these abbrevs. are just misleading unless the real one is there beside it. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:07, 13 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The same problem occurs for (US) law reviews, who usually (but not exclusively) follow the abbreviations listed in the Bluebook, which are also different from the ISO4 ones. The solution taken there is exactly the same as here (except that the Bluebook abbreviations in the lead usually are not bolded) and seems to work fine there. --Randykitty (talk) 12:52, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's encouraging, but not much, since readers of this version of Wikipedia are presumably better able to derive abbreviations of English-language journals for themselves than they are for German ones (and there are some tricks for reason of history - as I mentioned before, the really weird one is PBB - we have an article, and note the official abbreviation is relegated to the 2nd para. of the lede, where it's explained, because the infobox insists on that largely unused gobbledygook rather than allowing the abbrev. that is almost always used - and official. But really it's a further argument for having an additional line in the infobox. If I knew anything of programming whatsoever I'd just add it. Yngvadottir (talk) 13:11, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think the PBB case is atypical, because the acronym comes from a nickname and not the official title. In any case, you can of course propose adding a line to the infobox on its talk page. --Randykitty (talk) 13:28, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I did. I also note there's a sandbox all set up, but I am not technically competent. Otherwise I can see no harm in adding it, and documenting that it's for use only when a common or official abbreviation also exists. ... (adding) - that's very much an extreme case, yes. Making the point all the clearer in that case. Yngvadottir (talk) 14:52, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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