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User:Peaceray/Converting Havard citations to shortened footnotes (sfn)

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Framing the problem

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The urgency
  • As per WP:PARREF, there is a consensus that inline parenthetical referencing should be deprecated on English Wikipedia.
What is parenthetical referencing & what's the simplest way to replace it?

Why use shortened footnotes?

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  • They are advantageous when individual sets of footnotes reference different pages from the same source.
  • The full citations are then placed in alphabetic or alphanumeric order, rather than in order of citation use. This eases locating the citation when viewing the section by itself.
  • In cases where an article has an inconsistent citation style, WP:CITEVAR recommends seeking consensus and
  • imposing one style on an article with inconsistent citation styles (e.g., some of the citations in footnotes and others as parenthetical references): an improvement because it makes the citations easier to understand and edit;
  • combining duplicate citations (see Duplicate citations).

Before and after examples

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Step by step: how to do it

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Recommended: install User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js

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This will warn you of any errors such as full citations that are not used by shortened footnotes, or sfns that do not have a full citation to which to link.

To install the script, add:
importScript('User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js');
to Special:MyPage/common.js.

Pick an article

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State your intention on the article talk page

To obtain a full citation and a sfn

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  • Pick a citation in your target article that needs conversion
  • If you have a URL, DOI, ISBN, PMID, PMCID, or OCLC #, go to Citer
  • If you only have a title for a book, a journal, or article, go to WorldCat.org to get an OCLC # or an ISBN, then go to Citer at https://citer.toolforge.org/. (Also see [Github citer page https://github.com/5j9/citer] for concise description)
  • Citer examples — Note that some need to be manually adjusted
  • If the citation link goes to a Google books item, then follow the About this link-->Get this book in print-->Find in a library pulldown/links. This will take you to WorldCat to get an OCLC # or an ISBN, then go to Citer.
  • At Citer, pick the appropriate ID type from the drop down list at the upper left, enter the ID value (URL, DOI, ISBN, OCLC #, etc.) that you have. Submit.
  • Copy the Shortened footnote and citation to a text editor.
  • Adjust the citation as needed. For instance, if the URL or DOI is to an article, and the generated citation omits the author(s) or date(year), alter the citation and the {{sfn}} template accordingly, including any |ref= values. If the citation has one or more author last names, it will generate a ref value containing the each of the first four author names plus the year of publication.
  • Citer will typically render a single author as {{sfn |last_name |year |p=}} format whereas it will render two authors will generate a {{sfn |last1_name |last2_name |year |p=}} format. Please keep this in mind if you are manually altering the generated values.
  • Or hand craft it yourself!

Placing the citation and a sfn

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  • Ensure that there are the appropriate sections. I prefer ==References== and ==Sources==. See MOS:NOTES.
  • Either place the full citation first by editing the Sources section (easier), or by placing the full citation and sfns simultaneously by editing the full article code (harder). Always preview! If you have User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js installed, it will warn you of any errors.
  • If are placing the shortened footnote(s) after placing the full citation, do it now.

End steps

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After you have completed the conversion, there are follow through steps.

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