User talk:RexxS/NoCiteBar

Pseudo-MLA vs pseudo-APA

I've seen at FAC articles that use <<Author Short title pages>> all the time - essentially MLA, but with the modification of always including the title to eliminate the possibility of someone later adding another work by the same author and so messing up citations. To my mind, this is an equally unambiguous identification of the source as author+year would be (particularly as scholars can and do write more than one work in the same year!). Would you disagree? Nikkimaria (talk) 00:54, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

I would disagree Nikki. I believe you are mistaken about "equally ambiguous". In my experience, authors regularly write multiple books on the same subject (requiring disambiguation), but authors rarely write multiple books on the same subject in the same year. You may have a different experience to me, but just looking at Jane Austen 18 February, you'll see that of the more than 146 short citations, around half have a duplicate author and need disambiguation in MLA-style - and see how many different ways Southam's works are referred to. Contrast that with the Harvard style of Jane Austen 24 August, where not a single short citation needs a disambiguation because all of the books by the same author were published in different years.

Harvard-style short cites do not depend on an editor arbitrarily manufacturing a "short title", nor on having a different set of elements depending on whether disambiguation is needed or not. Any new editor can come to the article and only have to learn to write {{sfn|Author|Year|p=Page}}. That's it. No scouring through the rest of the text to check whether somebody else has added a cite to another book by the same author, or whether somebody else has already concocted a "short title" for the work. How about importing those made-up short title cites from a sister article which had different editors? A year is a year. Harvard always has three elements (counting multiple authors as one element, of course), which is consistent. I don't believe anybody can say the same about MLA when used in Wikipedia. --RexxS (talk) 21:50, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

To clarify, I was only referring to (visible) outputs, not the underlying coding. I know the arguments regarding templated vs not, and theoretically both MLA and APA could be achieved by either templates or handwritten citations. But the style I refer to isn't the one at Austen (in any diff), it's one that has the same elements regardless of need for disambiguation - always a short title, whether there's one work by an author or twenty. That's why I called it "pseudo-MLA", in the same way that "Harvard-style" approximates APA; they both use the fuller form of those respective styles (always including short title for MLA, always including page number for APA which usually doesn't require that). And if you start using short cites for journal articles too (as I've also seen), then absolutely authors write more than one thing on the same subject in the same year! Nikkimaria (talk) 23:04, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

I'd concede the point that disambiguation is more often necessary in Harvard-style short cites when citing journals, but argue that even then, it is still far less common than having to disambiguate author names (which can't actually fail to be true).

So in your p-MLA-style, you make the rule that there always has to be three elements: <<Author "Short Title" Page>>. So we are back to parity on disambiguation, depending on how we generate "Short Title". I know how to teach a newbie how to write the Year (!), but how do I teach them to write a "Short Title"? Is there a formula, an algorithm, that ensures that the "Short Title" is consistent when created by different editors? or when created by different editors on different articles that may wish to share content later. The year is always going to be the same. I can't say the same for disambiguating between:

• Southam, B. C., ed. (1968). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1811–1870. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-2942-X.
• Southam, B. C., ed. (1987). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7102-0189-3.

Is <<Southam, "Scott in the Quarterly Review", Vol. 1, 58>> viable? Or is <<Southam JA:TCH 1811–1870 1958>> - what is the rule for italics or quotes anyway?, I forget. How about <<Southam, "Criticism 1870–1940", 108>>? or is that actually a chapter in Grey, J. David, ed. (1986). The Jane Austen Companion. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-02-545540-0.?

I think I'll stick to teaching folks to disambiguate by year. What do you think? --RexxS (talk) 23:28, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Depends. If I'm talking to someone who's already used to using MLA, I can "translate" it into the Wikipedia context in a way that make sense to them a lot easier than templates. Whereas for a class of students, I'd point out the cite toolbar or Citoid, because (a) they're not particularly familiar with any citation style to begin with and (b) they tend to like convenience. I wouldn't use an MLA-based style myself because I don't like MLA generally, but if an editor can set it up in a way that makes sense, more power to them. Look for example at Monroe Edwards. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:59, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

As Slartibartfast says "That's where it all falls down of course." As soon as you look at an example, you can see the shortcomings. Monroe Edwards has 19 short cites and 16 long cites. With all due respect to Ealdgyth, I personally don't see the point in using <<Robbins "Origin and Development of the African Slave Trade" East Texas Historical Journal p. 158>> as a short form of <<Robbins, Fred (1971). "The Origin and Development of the African Slave Trade in Galveston, Texas, and Surrounding Areas from 1816 to 1836". East Texas Historical Journal. 9 (2): 153–161.>>. I could ask whether a new editor would realise that they have to create the "Short Title" by using the name of the article in quotes plus the name of the journal in italics. I would add that many MLA users, wouldn't use p. before the page number. As an alternative, I could simply use the author's last name plus the page number as the short cite (i.e. MLA-style). It would work just as well for the article as it stands - and that's the problem with MLA. In Monroe Edwards the made-up scheme has worked well for a collaboration of experienced editors, but I would have my doubts about what might happen if a newer editor wanted to add a bit of text sourced to Mark Robbins' chapter "How I Became a Gunkholer" in The Chesapeake: Legends, Yarns & Barnacles:: A Collection of Short Stories from the pages of The Chesapeake, Book 2: Volume 2. For comparison, using Wikipedia's {{sfn}}, you would have {{sfn|Robbins|1971|p=158}} for the current cite, and the new cite would use {{sfn|Robbins|2015|p=109}}. To my mind, that's a bit closer to what I consider "short" YMMV. --RexxS (talk) 17:04, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

The system in Edwards, however, is a lot closer to what many history works use - where the footnote/endnote is usually of the form "Author Short title page number" and the full citation is given in a bibliography (with the caveat that most historical works use abbreviations for a LOT of commonly cited works - normally I'd cite to the EHR and ASC rather than spell out the words English Historical Review or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - but we can't use abbreviations as liberally as the sources I usually consult do. Most history works have a "list of abbreviations" at the start or end of the work, although in most fields there's a common set of standard abbreviations - in my field it's EHR ASC EHD OV BL 'RAN EYC PRO PRS, etc) It works and another advantage is it doesn't require you to click down to the bibliography to see what "Author (year)" actually refers to. Edwards isn't really a great example, however, because there aren't any repeat authors there. Something like Wilfrid - where we have multiple citations to various authors makes it clearer. It's easier for me to remember the title of a work I'm citing than have to figure out and flip around to the title page to remember what YEAR the thing was published. And if I'm looking at a list of short cites, I don't have to consult the bibliography to see whether the Campbell 1998 is Cambell's book The Anglo-Saxon State, or if its his article "Bede" or his article "First Century of Christianity"... it's right there in the citation when I hover over the note. Worse would be the Lapidge citations in Wilfred - they are entries in an encyclopedia so they are the same year - so it makes it even more difficult - is "Lapidge 2001a" the "Ælfflæd" article or the "Theodore" article? Simpler to use titles. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:26, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, Ealdgyth. But are you advocating the system used in Edwards? Have a look at the counter-example I gave to Ling, below. Can I ask how many of the short cites in Wilfrid were written by someone other than yourself? On a brief examination, I couldn't find any. I'll repeat what I've said earlier: for an article with a single editor, or a small group of experienced editors, you can feasibly use any style you care to concoct. However, made-up styles with no written documentation are difficult to emulate for a new editor and impossible to teach. They are also a bar to exchanging citations between related articles written by different authors. New editors don't have a "list of abbreviations" anywhere to refer to when trying to add a citation to an article. My stance is that we don't want to limit article editors to subject experts. I hope you'd be prepared to go along with that.

It's nice for a registered user to be able to hover over a reference number in the text and see a short title. However, we're not writing the encyclopedia for editors, I hope. Over 95% of readers can't have nav popups enabled, so they have to click on the ^number to see the short cite. Using {{sfn}}, the full citation (highlighted for them) is just a click away. For example, clicking on takes you to the short cite <<Blair 2005, p.90>>. A second click will highlight the full citation, complete with publisher, ISBN, etc. Afterwards, that's just one more click of the back-button, or press of the ← Backspace key to get the reader back to where they were in the text. If the reader is looking at a list of short cites using sfn, one click will show them whether they are looking at <<Campbell, James E (2003). The Anglo-Saxon State. London: Hambledon & London. ISBN 1-85285-176-7.>> or <<Campbell, James (1986). "Bede I". Essays in Anglo-Saxon History. London: Hambledon Press. ISBN 0-907628-32-X.>>

I'll cheerfully concede that your version of MLA can be a convenience for sole editors or small collaborations of experienced editors. I still maintain that the trade-off against simplicity, consistency and portability for new editors does not render it a viable alternative to {{sfn}}. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 18:47, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

The plain reader of Wilfrid will only need to click on the number to be taken to a citation that works enough to pick it out from the full bibliography. Of course, the number of readers who actually read our citations is probably vanishingly small - given the number of times I've had someone ask me what the numbers in an article ... I would be perfectly fine if sfn would allow the display of titles for other citation styles (such as the system in use in many medieval history books) .. I would gladly switch to sfn then ... but right now, it doesn't fit my needs nor fit the style of citation that I'm most used to. And last I checked - WP:CITEVAR still was policy. As I said - if we can allow for more variations with sfn ... I'll be happy to start using it. Until then, I'm happy to allow others to add information and citations to articles I've worked on and then "fix" them to conform to the style in use. But let's face it - very very few articles on wikipedia are true collaborations with lots and lots of people adding information and citations. Much more common is the single editor or a very small group of editors. (Let's face it - how likely is it you're going to run into three or four people at an edit-a-thon who are suddenly going to decide to edit on medieval English bishops? Or obscure Texas forgers?) Ealdgyth - Talk 19:03, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

@Ealdgyth: How about {{sfn|Blair|''World of Bede''|p=151}}? If you really must. CITEVAR is indeed policy, but so is WP:OWN, and misuse of CITVAR is the commonest weapon in the toolbox of the owners. For the number of times it's really been used to defend an article from an arbitrary change, as opposed to blocking an improvement, we'd be better off without it. If I were a cynic, I might suggest that schemes that only the single editor or a very small group of editors understand would tend to result in a situation where very very few articles on wikipedia are true collaborations with lots and lots of people adding information and citations. Perhaps we should run an editathon on medieval English bishops: I'll teach 'em; you help 'em with the hard stuff?

Sorry, I'm probably keeping you from something worthwhile, but I do appreciate the opportunity to work through some of the referencing issues I've collected over time. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 19:31, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

All you're doing is keeping me entertained while I do some boring stuff in World of Warcraft. I'd be perfectly happy with that for sfn. Would be even nicer if {{sfn|Blair|World of Bede|151}} (every keystroke saved...). The one other issue I have with sfn is that it does NOT play with the edit references user script I use all the time... User:Dr_pda/editrefs.js. That thing is really really handy for the fine tuning needed to get everything set at FAC. Ealdgyth - Talk 19:38, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

As far as "I'll teach 'em; you help 'em with the hard stuff?" I'd gladly do that except... the hard stuff is the obscene cost of the books needed. One reason I'm able to do it was I already had a bunch... and I have gradually added as I could find them cheap. (I also own a photocopier so I can copy relevant sections of things I get through interlibrary loan). I will say that JSTOR/ODNB/etc access has really really helped also - that's a great program from Wikimedia. And the book grant I got has been great too. (Amazon Wish List of medieval books I probably need) Ealdgyth - Talk 19:47, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Don't get me started on WoW. I couldn't resist ordering the new expansion, so now I've got to level 14 characters from 100 to 110 next week. I can't face it. The problem with {{sfn|Blair|World of Bede|151}} is that you couldn't get <<Thacker "Saint-making and Relic Collecting" St Oswald of Worcester, pp. 254–255>> if it automatically added the italics for you. Some you win ...

I also used to like Dr pda, but as I've moved to {{sfn}} and/or {{r}} with list-defined references to keep the wikitext as clean as possible, I've learned to live without it. At least I can guarantee that in articles I'm writing all the citations are in alphabetical order in the References section. I get JSTOR as a Cambridge alumnus and ONDB through my local library card, so I guess I'm lucky, and I don't need to take ups slots on Jake's scheme. Send the top few of your book wish-list for a grant from WMUK, and tell them you're looking to do an editathon with me <grin>. Do you like the MLA-style long citations, by the way? --RexxS (talk) 20:23, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

I really don't care how the long form citations are formatted - history tends to be all over the place. (Historians don't really LIKE MLA because it appears a lot of us hate remembering publication dates.) I use the cite family here and have all the citations I use a lot at User:Ealdgyth/History References and User:Ealdgyth/Journal articles (and a few other subpages). When I wrote my own books, I used my ancient copy of How to Write a Research Paper and winged it. I already got a book grant this year (Think it was from WMUK? No, it was WMDC ... ) Is there a form for WMUK grants? I so suck at that sort of thing... (And I have only four 100s to move up, but I have a ton of youngsters. I'm slow at leveling... I enjoy the trip too much... enjoying the demon hunter though...) Ealdgyth - Talk 20:32, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Works cited

• Blair, John P (2005). The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-921117-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Blair, Peter Hunter (1990). The World of Bede (Reprint of 1970 ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-39819-3.
• Campbell, James (1986). "Bede I". Essays in Anglo-Saxon History. London: Hambledon Press. ISBN 0-907628-32-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Campbell, James E (2003). The Anglo-Saxon State. London: Hambledon & London. ISBN 1-85285-176-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Just showing off

• Blair, John P (2005). The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-921117-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |mode=mla (help)
• Blair, Peter Hunter (1990). The World of Bede (Reprint of 1970 ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-39819-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |mode=mla (help)
• Campbell, James (1986). "Bede I". Essays in Anglo-Saxon History. London: Hambledon Press. ISBN 0-907628-32-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |mode=mla (help)
• Campbell, James E (2003). The Anglo-Saxon State. London: Hambledon & London. ISBN 1-85285-176-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |mode=mla (help)
• Charles-Edwards, T.M. (2000). "'The Continuation of Bede', s.a. 750: High-Kings of Tara and 'Bretwaldas'". In Smyth, Alfred P (ed.). Seanchas: Studies in Early Medieval Irish Archaeology, History and Literature in Honour of Francis J. Byrne. Dublin & Portland: Four Courts Press. ISBN 1-85182-489-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |mode=mla (help)

Comments by Lingzhi

It would take perhaps two hours or so to sit down and write a top-to-bottom rebuttal, and another 45 minutes to edit and revise. Alas, I don't have solid blocks of time like that. The only option I have is dropping by from time to time to make a running commentary. This will make my comments disjointed, which may be frustrating. I apologize in advance. [Full disclosure: I actually use APA, not MLA, in all my academic publications. There is a new 8th edition MLA that has several changes from prior editions; many of them hospitable to our goals. I do not have access to that edition, so I do not know all MLA details].

• The very first sentence is begging the question. Having a small set of options (MLA, APA, Chicago, Bluebook, other?) does not in any way place a bar on improving citations in Wikipedia. Rather, it encourages editors from different fields to display a format they are comfortable with. In terms of the data entry facing the editor, if this is done via templates (as it should be, IMO) then there is no difference between entering the cite book and the cite mla except for a single |mode= parameter.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 01:16, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
• The argument that MLA is not suitable because our content is not fixed is addressed by Nikkimaria above: make short titles obligatory. Moreover, again, the 8th edition seems to include new suggestions that address this (or cover it implicitly). We need access to that!  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 01:19, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
• Harvard style frequently encounters multiple works by same author in same year. Format is Smith 1977a, Smith 1977b etc. Not clear to me how that is inherently better than Smith A Life and Smith Letters.   Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 02:54, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Is it OK if I offer my commentary as we go along?

• Have you ever tried improving the citations on a page that used a mish-mash of hand-written citations, using a mixture of pseudo-MLA, pseudo-Harvard, "sort of APA", etc. into a single format using templates? I have, and my experience is that the page curators kick up such a fuss and complain so indignantly about "breach of CITEVAR", that I've learned to give up and leave the article in a mess. CITEVAR is single most abused guideline on Wikipedia and editors need to understand that it's an algorithm to avoid to-and-fro disputes between two equivalent schemes, not a stick to beat editors who are actually improving the article into a standardised format. "Leave it alone! I know how to write the citations." -- i.e, I don't want anybody else editing my work.
• I am completely unconvinced by Nikki's argument above for the reasons I appended above. Making short titles obligatory makes a mockery of the word "short" when you have chapters in books to cite, or it leaves the shortening of the title to each individual editor. That's fine if an article has just one editor; completely unsuitable for a large article with multiple contributors, especially if we want to import form another article. I agree that <<Smith 1877a> is not really any better than <<Smith A Life>> but it's a hundred times rarer; while <<Robbins 1971>> is much shorter than <<Robbins "Origin and Development of the African Slave Trade" East Texas Historical Journal>> (real example from Monroe Edwards, a featured article). Then <<Robbins 2015>> is sufficient to disambiguate the Harvard-version, while the equivalent disambiguation in your scheme would be <<Robbins "How I Became a Gunkholer" The Chesapeake: Legends, Yarns & Barnacles:: A Collection of Short Stories from the pages of The Chesapeake, Book 2: Volume 2>>. Optionally you could shorten them. I'll then ask you write down the rules for how to create a "Short Title". I know how to tell editors to a add "a, b" to a year. --RexxS (talk) 17:34, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• The thing is - there is no requirement that citations in Wikipedia be consistent across articles. Merely that they are consistent within an article. Trying to force someone from my background (medieval history) where the common system is NOT "Robbins 1971" is just as annoying as me trying to force you to use the medieval historical system. If someone comes along and adds data and a citation to an article I've worked on, and they don't get the citation formatted to the system, I generally just adjust the citation. There are several editors who come along and add things to articles I've worked on, and I just adjust them to the system in use. And if I go to an article that's already got a consistent system .. I try to use that system (like ... say... Horse or William Cragh). I want a system that is easy for me to add information to but doesn't require me to continually try to remember what year something was published in. Obviously, some people have no issues with remember publication dates before titles of works, but I do not. And obviously a number of publishing houses agree - since I checked a number of works on my shelf and Cambridge UP and Tempus and Yale UP and Brill and Boydell (to name a few) use the "Author Short title page#" system I've described. Ealdgyth - Talk 17:56, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• There's no requirement to break up an article into sensible sections, either, but it makes life a lot easier if it is. Being able to easily swap citations between similar articles is a boon, not a requirement, but it doesn't make it any less desirable. How many of the printed works on your shelf were written by an unlimited number of authors and are subject to constant updates? Apples and durian. If we wanted an encyclopedia that only a small group of subject experts could edit, we'd have created Citizendium, and look where that went. You want a system that's easy for you to add information: I want a system that's easy for anybody to add information. If somebody can document how to consistently create "Short titles", I'll remove my objections. Anybody can see the documentation at Template:Sfn/doc (even if it doesn't mention using {{sfn|Blair|''World of Bede''|p=151}} !) --RexxS (talk) 20:01, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• A short title is ... dare I say it... common sense. Take enough to identify without garbling.

• Aird, William M. (2008). Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy c. 1050-1134. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1-84383-660-5. - I'd do "Aird Robert Curthose"
• Barber, Richard (1993). Henry Plantagenet 1133–1189. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 1-56619-363-X. - I'd do "Barber Henry Plantagenet" but I could also see "Barber Henry"
• Cheney, C. R., ed. (1995). Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (Reprint ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55151-X. - I'd do either "Cheney Handbook" or "Cheney Handbook of Dates"
• Crouch, David (2005). The Birth of Nobility : Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900–1300. New York: Longman. ISBN 0-582-36981-9. - I'd probably do "Crouch Birth of Nobility" but "Crouch Birth" would also work.
• Barlow, Frank (1979). The English Church 1000–1066: A History of the Later Anglo-Saxon Church (Second ed.). New York: Longman. ISBN 0-582-49049-9. - these would be tricky - if BOTH are in use, I'd probably go "Barlow English Church 1000-1066" but if only one is in use, "Barlow English Church" would makes sense.
• Barlow, Frank (1979). The English Church 1066–1154: A History of the Anglo-Norman Church. New York: Longman. ISBN 0-582-50236-5. - see above - but it'd be "Barlow English Church 1066-1154" if both were in use (stating the obvious). Ealdgyth - Talk 20:25, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• It's not an exact science, but a lot of writing isn't, unfortunately. Ealdgyth - Talk 20:25, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• The problem is: if we want lots of editors from diverse backgrounds to contribute, then an exact science is what we need to guarantee consistency. <<Author Year[a/b//c], p. Page>> is exact. Anyway you picked your examples to make short titles out of; how about doing mine?
  • Southam, B. C., ed. (1968). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1811–1870. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-2942-X.
  • Southam, B. C., ed. (1987). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1870–1940. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7102-0189-3.
• That's where common sense starts to cut across the need for a short title. --RexxS (talk) 19:58, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

• "Southram Jane Austen 1 p. X" and "Southram Jane Austen 2 p. X" Ealdgyth - Talk 20:02, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

• Then a year later I turn up wanting to cite stuff to <<Southam, B. C. (ed.). Jane Austen: Letters.>> volumes 1 and 2 ... :D --RexxS (talk) 20:30, 28 August 2016 (UTC)
• And, of course, if only one of the Barlow works above was in use, I'd definitely turn up later wanting to cite the other. If you've used the shortest form because only one is in use, we've got a problem. --RexxS (talk) 20:33, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

• It's only a problem if we were a print source where things couldn't be changed. It is simple enough to tweak a short citation later if it needs disambiguation later. Ealdgyth - Talk 20:36, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

• There's always the scenario where I don't realise that I've concocted an ambiguous short title, or made somebody else's cite ambiguous. Oh - and where the first one is used (n) times, but the wiki-tweaker (is that a variety of wiki-gnome?) only spots (n-1) of them, and it stays like that for years. --RexxS (talk) 21:21, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

• Tweaking sfn to MLA short-form is not at all undoable. I made a fake example to Adorno in my sandbox article, similar to your {{sfn|Blair|''World of Bede''|p=151}}. I think the comma may be wrong, but all else is OK.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 22:26, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Comments by SMcCandlish

Possible quibble

Thanks for starting this page; more thought on this is needed, and "the CITEVAR cabal" needs to be put to bed.

I did have a potential issue with this statement (aside from it needing a comma): "there's no need to mention the name of the chapter as the page number is perfectly sufficient. Following the urge to name chapters as a means of showing your erudition is just intellectual masturbation." If it means mentioning the chapter title in the short citation, I would agree. In the long citation, it is essential information for exactly the same reasons it is for a journal article citation: The title is content and matters; it tells us a lot about the article; it helps us distinguish multiple articles by the same authors; it helps us find online copies of the article; articles are often republished in later works (or were republished in the one being cited at present) and thus are available from more than one physical source; titles of well-known articles/papers/chapters are individually meaningful as identifiers to many editors (e.g., we may know from professional experience that the work in question is/is not reliable for what it's being cited for), etc., etc. All kinds of mental self-stroking on WP occurs, but identifying the actual titles of works published in edited collections is not among that type of activity.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:24, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

I think I disagree. While a chapter title in a book may be desirable for the reasons you outline, it cannot be essential. When the editor added the cite, they had the source to refer to. The book's title, year, edition, isbn all serve to identify the exact source used - and WP:V is the fundamental reason for adding references in Wikipedia. Once you have the same book, the only thing essential to identify the source is the page number. Now, quoting the chapter title is likely a service to readers who wish to do further research on the topic themselves, but that will always be a secondary function of the references.

What would be interesting would be to get some research on how many visitors ever check sources and how many use references as the basis of further research. We've been trying to look at some of those issues at WikiProject MED, but it really needs some rigorous work done to get some proper answers. Until then, I suppose we're all just speculating. --RexxS (talk) 20:13, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Response to the "Comments by Lingzhi" section

ORLY? The obvious problem with Ealdgyth's "Trying to force someone from my background (medieval history) where the common system is NOT "Robbins 1971" [to use another citation style] is just as annoying as me trying to force you to use the medieval historical system.": If Ealdgyth submitted a paper to a journal that required "Robbins 1971", Ealdgyth would shrug and comply (see second quote, below, for proof). There's this "magical exceptionalism" going on here, since WP started. Every professionally produced publication of any quality in the world has a house style, and people who write for it comply (or what they submit is made to comply) or they don't get published. If this kind of hissy-fit [I mean the entire citation style deathmatch nonsense, not anything Ealdgyth in particular has said or done] about "I wanna write in my topic with my citation style <stamping feet>" behavior appeared anywhere else, those engaging in it would be laughed at mercilessly, and if their colleagues witnessed this behavior, it would actually damage the professional reputation of the thrower of the "citation style tantrum". We know for a fact that it's silly posturing. Even Ealdgyth, a proponent of permitting article-by-article "style enforcement" says "if I go to an article that's already got a consistent system .. I try to use that system", so we have mutually established that there is, in fact, no problem at all using a citation style that isn't what one prefers as ideal. It's simply, and obviously, topical territorialism. "This is a [insert my oh-so-special speciality here] article, so it should use [insert most common cite style used in that specialty] citations." (See "SSF" below for why this is fallacious reasoning.) No one could possible take this seriously, unless that is exactly the game they were playing.

BT;DT: We already went through all this with the enormously drawn-out style hissy-fit thrown about capitalization of species vernacular names for certain things, with eight fucking years of astounding levels of screany ranting along the lines of "not letting us capitalize these things makes WP look unprofessional, a laughing stock to experts, and drives away experts". It actually turned out to be a blatant lie: Only one single interdisciplinary journal could be found that permitted this capitalization for the specialization in question, and even some journals in that specialization did not permit the capitalization (it was just a draft standard from an organization concerned with establishing names and caring at all about their orthographical formatting only as an afterthought, and without resolving conflicts on the matter between much longer-established organizations; the draft idea was popular among many journals in that field but had not actually succeeded as a standard). It's the same story here. "I demand to do AMA citations because that's the way to write about medicine." "MHRA cites should be used for all medieval European topics because that's how it's done in this field", etc. Well, no it's not. It's the way that lots but not all journals (which are not all publications we care about) in some countries do it, and how some but not all that many in some other countries like to cite, and it's totally ignored in other publications even for material about the same topic.

SSF: It's all a textbook example of the WP:Specialized-style fallacy (SSF), the irrational notion that because the high-end RS about a particular topic are the best, even only, sources for facts about that topic, they are necessarily the best or only sources for how to write about that topic. The citewarrior crap is a particularly poisonous and anti-encyclopedic SSF. As RexxS put it: "You want a system that's easy for you to add information: I want a system that's easy for anybody to add information.". Lingzhi opened this thread with the comment that having various inconsistent citation styles "encourages editors from different fields to display a format they are comfortable with", which is hilarious, because this has nothing at all to do with Wikipedia's goals. What we want, rather, is the display citations in a format that readers [and thus our editorial pool, in the aggregate] are comfortable with. The only possible way to do this is to devise an unambiguous, non-confusing, consistent citation style and use it so much and have our users see it so often (what with WP being in the top 3 to top 7 [depending on metric] most-used websites in the world) that they become very used to it, with interpretation of it automatic and second-nature. This has already happened, and it's called CS1. Our users are so accustomed to it probably the only frequently confusing thing to them about our citations is how often someone has made some of them wildly inconsistent with the vast majority of them.

KISS: In closing, I will just add that the solution to the "how do we chose between this shot-form citation format and that one?" so-called issue is obviously "stop bifurcating cites into long and short formats"! There is no need for it, and there hasn't been since I created {{Rp}} back in March 2007. It makes me want to strangle someone every time I see a short article with separate "Citations" and "References" sections (or whatever two random names they've picked that time – "Notes" and "Bibliography", "Footnotes" and "Sources", etc.), with each source cited only once, or all of them but one cited once and a single source cited multiple times. It's worse that pointless. Even for a long, complex article with 30 sources that are each cited multiple times, none of them cannot be handled with <ref ...>{{cite ...}}</ref>{{rp|page_number_here}}. There is no legitimate reason to have something like "(Johnson 2006a)" or "(Johnson Plenipotentiary Rustication)" ever appear in our article prose. Template:Rp has 21,000+ transclusions because it's useful. It doesn't have 2,100,000 transclusions because it is a threat to, and thus hated and hunted down by proponents of, the use of "precious" external citation styles they're trying to import and propagate on Wikipedia.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:41, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

• Hello SMcCandlish, thank you for your kind remarks. As I mentioned earlier, I don't really have blocks of time to generate a comprehensive reply, and that's more than doubly true for a great wall of text such as the one you very skillfully created above. Let me try to inject at least one or two alternate viewpoints into the jetstream of your comments:
  1. "This has already happened, and it's called CS1" You are just standing there openly bragging/gloating about WP:FAITACCOMPLI; arbcom has stated that fait accompli is unacceptable as a practice or an argument.
  2. "...which is hilarious, because this has nothing at all to do with Wikipedia's goals. What we want, rather, is the display citations in a format that readers [and thus our editorial pool, in the aggregate] are comfortable with." I am happy that you find my remarks hilarious. Any time I can bring some harmless (or even better yet, constructive) joy into someone's life, whether intentionally or not, I count myself the clear winner. Now that you have laughed all that out, however, I would invite you to consider another perspective: Wikipedia needs writers infinitely more badly than we need readers. That is not saying writers are superior to, better than, or intrinsically more important than readers; it is purely and simply an observation that follows from calculations of supply and demand. We are already "... in the top 3 to top 7 [depending on metric] most-used websites in the world". That would seem to be a large number of readers. Yet I seem to recall seeing charts and graphs on different forums agonizing about the dwindling number of editors. This is especially problematic (and to me at least, distressing) because so much of what are currently presenting is mediocre at best and poop at worst. I can provide an example from my personal range of interest: Bengal famine of 1943, which I am trying to rewrite in a sandbox. This topic covers millions of innocent souls as needlessly dead as could possibly be, and our article on that topic is shit. It's not just shit, but shitty shit. There are two reasons why our current article sucks (only one of which is relevant to this discussion). The first reason, irrelevant to this discussion but it must be mentioned, is POV warriors on two different issues. The second reason is the formidable amount of research the topic demands. We are already faced with a relative lack of editors, and from among those I would suggest that the strong numeric majority are probably just adding wee little driblets of info about their favorite pop music diva or professional wrestler. If offering a choice from among multiple citation formats is one small element of the host of factors that helps lure in a domain expert or diligent researcher who can add a well-written, comprehensive, well-researched, neutral and (well hopefully anyhow) stable text about an important topic, then why by gosh do we want to have it any other way? Wikipedia needs writers infinitely more badly than we need readers.
  3. Something about an edit war over capitalization. Who gives a crap. Apples and oranges, except in your mind.
• I'll try to add more later but I doubt I will have time today. I have already spent too much time here for today.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 01:02, 29 August 2016 (UTC)
  • FAITACCOMPLI doesn't refer to what you think it does. It most definitely does not mean the natural process of consensus evolving in a particular direction over time, which is what I'm talking about, and which is how virtually everything at WP is as it is (not always for the absolute best, but so it goes; sometimes early decisions or technical limitations set us on paths that are harder to diverge from later; WP:CITEVAR is a great example of such a negative, cascading effect). The fact that you do not detect how two very similar, long-term, factionalized style disputes are analogous, as to the problems they cause, their motivations, and how to resolve them, doesn't bode well for this conversation, but I'll give it a try anyway.

    I most strenuously disagree with the idea that "Wikipedia needs writers infinitely more badly than we need readers." The only reason we're doing any of this is for readers, and most of the articles WP needs are already written (watch the new pages creation queue some time, then correlate that with AfD, and you'll see that the bulk of new articles that actually stick (vs. "my garage band" crap that is deleted immediately) is either borderline-notable trivia like actors with two screen credits, or highly technical minutiae that arguably doesn't really need to be in an encyclopedia, but in a more specialist work. The third category, which we need more of, is composed of subjects out of the everyday Western societal interest flow. We do need more writers chipping away at the WP:SYSTEMICBIAS problem, but those writers aren't coming here to push a particular citation style, and are best served by a consistent toolset. The other writer-pool need that we have is for improvement of existing articles. Yet by WP:CITE's own terms, editors are not to muck about with citation styles already stable in any article. There's one inescapable, cold fact about this situation: editors end up having to learn every citation style, including other editors' made-up bullshit ones. This is, obviously, an impediment not a form of freedom. As with the other editorial pool we actually need, these editors are also best served by the simplicity of a consistent set of tools, not a profusion of conflicting ones. I sympathize and empathize with your article-improvement plight (on both counts; dealing with the PoV warriors at a single article can take years). But the tale doesn't support the argument. You are obviously not drawn to write at WP because of what citation style is called for at a particular article, and it doesn't make sense that anyone else would be.

    It might make sense to argue that not being able to use the citation style one is most familiar with might be a minor turn-off to participation. But even that argument doesn't hold up. None of these subject-matter-expert writers are unfamiliar with having to adapt to whatever house style the publisher uses; they do it all the time. When they get here, they have to do it a tremendous and unnecessary amount because every different article they go to has a divergent but set-in-stone citation style, some of them undocumented anywhere but in some WP:OWNer's brain. Even if some expert were totally obsessed with one citation style, refused to ever contribute to an article that didn't use it, and sought out those that did, and even if this were a memetic disorder that spread through the Internet like a virus, we would not care, because the need or a consistent toolset, for all editors in the aggregate, outweighs the need for various, swelling camps of style obsessives to get exactly what they want on pain of leaving (see WP:5THWHEEL, WP:YOU, WP:HIGHMAINT, etc.). And there is zero evidence these camps are swelling; the usage of the CS1 style templates shows they are, in fact, rapidly dwindling. The main problem with this "experts will leave if they can't cite the way they want" fantasy is that the entire scenario is an illusion to begin with. In reality, editors are not required to conform to any citation style when they edit. As long as the source is valid they can do nothing but paste in a URL and move on, if they want. WP:CITE only prevents people from changing the style of existing citations. An editor may grouse at you for introducing MLA cites into an AMA-cited article, but they can't actually stop you (though they sure will try), only clean up after you. Ergo, there is no actual barrier to entry, of any kind, to an expert who will not use any other cite style than the one they prefer.

    All this has ever been about is editors who like MHRA, or Chicago, or whatever style staking territorial claims on articles and trying to brow-beat other editors to use the style that one editor (or wikiproject) demands. It's the "there is only one way to write about [topic X], and if you don't do it the way I say, you are an idiot" fallacy, and its sibling, "if you don't write this way about [topic X] then experts will hate Wikipedia and say bad things about it", a paranoid delusion for which there is no evidence at all. It's time to bury this nonsense at the bottom of a deep pit. It's childish, apish junk-waving. Eliminating it by having a consistent citation style that we normalize to (whatever style people want to initially write in, if any) would eliminate a tremendous amount of editorial strife. That it would work is provably true, since the entire raison d'etre of the MoS is to eliminate such style-warring over all such matters (capitalization, punctuation, tone, date formatting, "national" dialects of English, use of icons, etc., etc., etc.), and it has worked. Fighting over style is largely confined to MoS's own talk page and what MoS says, rather than the same rehashed squabbles playing out 1,000 times per day at article after article. There is no qualitative difference between a citation style chest-beating contest and a quotation style or hyphenation style or abbreviation style chest-beating contest. The same inoculation cures all of them, and that shot is codifying something specific and consistent. This is what all style guides exist for, and it's why all serious publisher shave one. WP does too, we just (very unfortunately) permitted a little cabal to WP:POVFORK a small part of it off into their own irrational little fiefdom.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:21, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

  • Very key point: Consensus? Really? Where? How many editors were involved in determining this consensus you're speaking of? Was there a community-wide discussion where the question was, "Hey, let's just have one template format" was discussed? I don't recall hearing of such a community-wide discussion. It's really isn't fair play to say you're standing legitimately within consensus if "consensus" means (in your mind) "Me and about five of my friends who hang out on the same talk pages". If there never really was that particular community-wide discussion, then WP:FAITACCOMPLI means exactly and precisely this case. This may even be the definitive case.
  • You are confusing who the encyclopedia is for and who it needs. It's for readers; it needs editors. Utterly non-controversial assertion.
  • You keep saying "house style", but in Wikipedia's mansion are many houses. Wikipedia at least potentially has editors from every conceivable discipline, and demonstrably from a very wide range of them. It's odd to talk about a "house style" in this case.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 06:21, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Bundling

Some of the problems identified here also hold true for separate footnotes. "The sky is blue and the sea is green.[51][52][53]" Which source supports what? Only something like "The sky is blue[1][2] and the sea is green.[3]" would make it absolutely clear, but in my experience most articles follow the first style. And when the sentence gets more complex than "fact 1, fact 2", it becomes even more difficult to see which source supports what unless you have access to all of them. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:49, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

That's true. Although if I wanted to reuse "The sky is blue", it's sufficient and simple to cite it to [51] (rather than having to unpack a bundled cite), as long as AWB hasn't come along and re-ordered the cites in a "neater" numerical order. But that's another story.

Nevertheless take a look at: It may also be implicated in damage to red blood cells (haemolysis),[5][6] the liver,[7] heart,[8] endocrine glands (adrenal glands, gonads, and thyroid),[9][10][11] or kidneys,[12] and general damage to cells.[2][13] (see Oxygen toxicity #Classification). That's 8 facts supported by 10 citations. I really, really wouldn't want those bundled up into a single citation at the end of the sentence. There would probably be no harm in bundling [2] and [13]; I'd prefer to be able to reuse [9][10][11] individually, but unbundling would be a chore not a disaster. I just think it sets a bad example for inexperienced editors who will copy the idea in inappropriate circumstances. Of course bundling does stop AWB from changing the order of cites, so maybe it's got an upside after all ... --RexxS (talk) 20:56, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

It's often just necessary to review the sources and re-construct the material to put the cites in the right place, after either drive-by mess-making by "bundlers", or due to palimpsestuous edits injecting material into a once properly cited passage without adding a source for that addition. I've occasionally had people edit-war against me to push all cites to the end of a sentence or even paragraph, but they generally do not prevail, especially when other editors are brought in to comment on the matter. I remember that some other Wikipedia (French?) has cite templates that enclose the material being sourced, in the code, and this would be a good idea, but people oppose it because it complicates the markup. As the editorial pool matures from "every random passerby on the Internet" to a long-term roster of committed editors, it becomes more and more difficult to take the argument seriously.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:27, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Calcification of the editor corps is not really A Good Thing - we still need newbies, if for no other reason than to combat natural attrition. Nikkimaria (talk) 12:39, 29 August 2016 (UTC)