User:Rich Farmbrough/temp67
Deprecate month, semi deprecate year.
[edit]Use of terms
[edit]Date is a general term that includes anything as or more coarsely grained than a day. Examples:
- What is the date? 12th January 2011
- What is the date of that magazine? June 2006
- What date was 1984 published? 1948
- What date would you give that furniture? Early 1870s
And do forth up to dating fossils from an era.
Current fields
[edit]The template currently supports date month and year.
These fields (as a group) fulfil two purposes, providing a publication date, and assisting in creating a Harvard reference
Publication date
[edit]The date field is used if there is one, failing that year + month, failing that year.
Harvard ref
[edit]Year is never needed for a Harvard ref, in the sense that there is a ref field and the only time the Harvard referencing cannot use the date field is when there are two works by the same name in the same year: in this case they are "Good 2006a" and "Good 2006b" (or "Good 2006" and "Good 2006a", whatever) - and in this case the "ref" field can be used (ref=Good 2006b instead of ref=harv).
Drawbacks
[edit]- Duplication of data is not good
- Extra blank fields get propagated by cut and paste
- Having a year field set to "2006b" seems like a bad thing.
- Users can fill in the year field when they have the full date and not make information available
- Users can duplicate information in the 3 fields
- Poeple who cut and paste the templates may update the date field and leave old values in the others or vice versa.
Advantages
[edit]- Generates the Harvard ref tag from the name of the author and the non-year (2006b)
Proposal
[edit]{{{year}}}
to be kept only when it is Harvard extended, or when there is a date field but it is legitimately badly formed (e.g. winter 2006). Possibly rename field{{{Harvard year}}}
- Cases where Harvard extension is used but not needed should be cleaned up separately. E.G. when there is Good2006a and no other Good2006 references. Also gaps in lettering sequence.
{{{month}}}
to be merged into the{{{date}}}
field and deprecated{{{date}}}
to be cleaned up where needed (e.g. 19-12-1968 etc.)
Advantages
[edit]- Less fields
- Less risk of inconsistency
- None of the disadvantages of the above
Disadvantages
[edit]- Requires a little work to bring existing articles in line.
Notes
[edit]- I have fixed a bug in {{Cite book}} that may resolve a number of problems. the fix is implemented in the sandbox.
- The key component it the template {{YEAR}}. This copes with many date formats, but not as many as if we could simply match \b\d{3,4}\b. Of course it is a prime candidate for improvement by template whizzes.
- There are some notes on possible date formats at Template talk:Cite book/sandbox.