User talk:P64/FSF/Doona

Classification and assessment

reference: Category:Novels by Anne McCaffrey

Science fiction. Decision at Doona is classic science fiction but all 24 Pern books are marked  fantasy-task-force=yes while Talk:Dragonsblood alone is marked  science-fiction-task-force=yes (the one of 24 with some explicit genetics). The same is true of Anne McCaffrey's other early f/sf books: Restoree, The Ship Who Sang, To Ride Pegasus, Dinosaur Planet, and The Crystal Singer are all marked fantasy; only The Ship is marked science fiction. That is too much momentum for this newcomer to stem.

Children's literature. Twenty of the 24 Pern books but none of those other five carry the {WikiProject Children's literature} banner. Doona is definitely for parents of young children!—alone among the 30 books named, in my offhand judgment. The important child in the featured family probably doesn't read yet (he's "incorrigible" and six years old). He is a prodigy learning the complex alien Hrruban language, which the prose features mainly in scattered nouns —rrla mda sser rroamal, etc. There are classic neologisms such as Alreldep for Alien Relations Department.

Importance. Low or nil for any WikiProject, I presume, and I dare specify that for {NovelsWikiProject}. --P64 (talk) 14:29, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Citations

Last night I returned to this article and revised it to second draft stage except for references format. One revision today concerns references alone, primarily the introduction of "Web site" citations for many pages at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (also harv citation for the book Dragonholder). --P64 (talk) 20:13, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Those citations are repetitive. If full citations for so many pages at ISFDB will be provided, their format should be revised —probably by extending the ISFDB templates, because it will be appropriate to cite ISFDB similarly in many other articles.

How much of this citation is appropriate?

Another approach is to cite few pages fully, with navigational instructions. For example Anne McCaffrey#References reference 58, here quoted in full: "^ The Talents Universe (series). ISFDB. Subpages for all constituent stories and books. Retrieved 2011-08-01." --P64 (talk) 20:00, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I think that citing the ISFDB records like this looks OK here. Probably for more than three books we would need to refer just to the series record and perhaps one or two others of particular significance, more or less your alternative suggestion. There is no need after all to replicate the ISFDB record structure! --Mirokado (talk) 21:44, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Adopting the alternative, should we provide references to less significant records using specific display text — note 9: "^ a b Crisis on Doona, ISFDB." — but link to the "Doona series" citation?

One criterion different from significance in the article would be that the display text appears at the fully cited record —here, "Crisis on Doona" appears as a linkname in the "Doona series" record. Any record not fully cited would be only one link away from the fully cited one. Also, a shortname such as "Worlds" for The Worlds of Anne McCaffrey seems appropriate only regarding a fully cited record.

By the way, do you know any wikipedia discussion of references to numerous pages in one complex online publication, or generated by one database? --P64 (talk) 19:24, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm not aware of a discussion about this, but there probably have been some! I think we could provide a reference to a top-level record and regard subpages as implicitly referenced. There could be a comment in the ref such as "See linked pages for details of individual books" or whatever. I try to avoid saying "you don't need to provide a reference for that" because the references will probably need to be added for featured article status anyway, but a top-level reference to a well-structured database should be fine. An analogy is that I saw a comment recently that it is not particularly necessary to provide page numbers covering a whole article in an encyclopedia as anyone can look for an article title (a page number for a particular detailed reference would of course be different). So I think I agree with you...

I also agree that we should mostly avoid nicknames for books. The use as a recognisable tag in the short form references is one possible exception. --Mirokado (talk) 00:31, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

I think that the way it is set up now in the article will likely be fine (pointing to the record for the series). But more specific citations would also be appropriate. I imagine if you want to push the article to GA or FA you will need full citations for each record that you want to use as a source, Sadads (talk) 17:44, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your time.

Sadads works on the WP:Novels backlog, among other things, and today assessed To Ride Pegasus. I directed his attention both to the example of this article, this Talk section, and to the polar opposite use at To Ride Pegasus of one "instructional reference" to a single high-level page generated by the database (Talents Universe, ISFDB). He considers the instruction not necessary and deleted it there.Pegasus edit, 2011-12-29 17:41. --P64 (talk) 19:24, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

References

References 3, 5, 6, and 7 differ in coding but share the display "Linkname colon remark" with a link to one of the full citations. (The model is Dragonflight#Notes note b.) This is awkward. Is it recommended here? --P64 (talk) 20:28, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I think refs 2, 3, 5, and 7 should be notes. Ref 6 is a duplicate of ref 5. In ref 3, I suggest moving the opening phrase in parentheses after the colon without parentheses, for consistent note format. We need to rephrase ref 5 to say "Anne McCaffrey lived in the vicinity of Dublin, Ireland from September 1970..." --Mirokado (talk) 21:52, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, there should be some Notes. I anticipate using "lower-alpha" refs throughout McCaffrey articles, even here where I do not anticipate that code will be copied from one article to others.

The code for note 5 {harvnb ...} is adapted from your use elsewhere. I did not find useful documentation. The code for identical note 6 {sfn ... |loc=pp. ...} is my best effort after reading documentation. I know of parameter {cite ... |quote= ...} and wonder why direct quotation but no paraphrase or explanatory remark is covered by that template function.

Regarding AIM's recent death, I have thought that December rather than November is a good month to engage in update. I wonder whether any of the dozens who have edited her biography this week will watch and participate. And whether any will find the much desired Image. --P64 (talk) 19:52, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I saw the post about using |loc= for extra information. That is ingenious and you have done it perfectly. I would prefer using harvnb though because then the format "pp. xx" is generated uniformly by the templates rather than sometimes by the templates and sometimes by embedded text, and any page metadata appears uniformly in the output html. Using sfn like that for a repeated reference would require repeating any extra information each time so sfn could consolidate it: the principle of "one true source" is better served by naming the ref enclosing harvnb.

The cite |quote= parameter should be reserved for actual quotes. In order to keep other extra material within the light blue highlight when jumping to the reference, we can use "|postscript=. Whatever." (which is clearly itself a bit of kludge). Alternatively we can just add extra material after the cite template and before the closing /ref. That is in any case necessary if we have used |quote= since in that case |postscript= is ignored. I doubt if it really matters as long as each article uses a consistent approach.

There is no "one correct way" of doing any of this, I suspect it has been difficult to write definitive documentation for these templates.

I completely agree about the wait before further updates, and of course resuming again. The articles have been improved by the extra points of view: some new editors may say to themselves in years to come "oh yes, I contributed to her Wikipedia article". I also hope that some of them will indeed be watching and continue to contribute. --Mirokado (talk) 00:11, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Copy to article space

I anticipate copying this article from my User space, rather than moving it, and giving it the title "Decision at Doona". (I am the only contributor.)

What to copy from this User talk will be a judgment call. The project banner is intended for Talk space, of course, and it is here only because I once anticipated moving the article. --P64 (talk) 20:52, 30 November 2011 (UTC)