Template talk:Adams Franzosa Introduction to Topology Pure and Applied

Purpose of template

Hi, Mgkrupa. What's the purpose of this template. It seems to be used on only two pages. Why it is necessary? Seems like over-engineering. It's throwing CS1 date and year errors. There's no documentation. Wouldn't it be best to just put the reference directly in two articles and delete this template as overkill? Jason Quinn (talk) 02:11, 23 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, the point is that I intend to use this template on more articles later. This template makes it easier to correct any mistakes that may be present in the citation; otherwise, it would be necessary to find and fix every article that used the problematic reference (I did this before and it became very tedious). It has the added benefit of making the same reference appear uniform across all articles that use it, meaning that all details of the citation will be the same. This template greatly simplifies citing the book and consequently, I add citations to edits more often than I did before. Personally, I don't understand why Wikipedia doesn't yet have a template where you just enter the ISBN for a published book and it immediately produces a citation (consistent across Wikipedia). I based this template on other similar templates (i.e. copied and pasted such a template and then changed it as necessary). Since this original template that I copied had existed for a while and was categorized, I assumed that it was allowed (please tell me if it isn't and I will stop). Mgkrupa 02:30, 23 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I was wondering, does Wikipedia have some reference management system like BibTeX that allows for a consistent citation to be generated across all Wikipedia articles from a single file? e.g. say from a page named Bibtex:ISBN-9788131726921 (or something else) that users can update as necessary and/or is automatically generated? Or is this to problematic to implement for some reason? If such a reference management system exists in Wikipedia (or if it existed) then I would use it instead of making these citation templates. Mgkrupa 03:56, 23 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]