Talk:Cuthbert Hilton Golding-Bird

Citation style battle
I had a tangential introduction to this article, in judging whether someone's early comment on the DYK nomination merited a QPQ credit, so I am aware of the extended argument over the article's citation style that occurred during the DYK nomination process and that has now boiled over to edits on the article itself now that it is on the main page. As the researcher and writer of many, many articles here on WP, I believe in WP:CITEVAR, I truly do, and many times I have been ticked off when others casually rearranged things on articles I had spent so much time on and had much better knowledge about.

All that said, the citations on the article preferred by the author are just plain difficult to follow. For instance there are all these repeated citations to just "Plarr's" and it is visually difficult to find "Plarr's" in the Bibliography. "AIM25" is another case of this. "BMJ" is confusing since there are two references from the British Medical Journal. The re-do of the citations, done by an uninvolved editor who specializes in copyediting, makes it much easier to find the sources the article is pointing to. So while 9 times out of 10 I would agree that WP:CITEVAR calls for the original citation style to be left alone, I think this is the 1 time out of 10 where the re-do is justified. Wasted Time R (talk) 17:14, 20 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for taking the time to open a discussion. It's not that I'm not willing to compromise to make the referencing more accessible, but I strongly object to drive-by editors who want to template everything.  I'm not following why repeated citations are problematic.  Bundled references are usually done to stop the reference section growing too large and to save the editor from typing the same infomation repeatedly.  The first is not really problematic with shortened references and the second is actually made worse by bundling.  Against that their are advantages for the reader in having the citations in the strict order they appear in the text.  Having said that, I have not reverted anyone just for bundling citations, they have been doing far more than that.


 * The difficulty of finding Plarr's has nothing to do with bundling. I suggest that your problem is that "Plarr's" does not appear right at the beginning of the cite.  We could solve that by placing in the author field something like "Plarr's author" or some such.  Finding the cite would then be exactly the same for all entries after they were reordered alphabetically. SpinningSpark 18:04, 20 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, I understand your arguments re bundling, and the 'strict order they appear in the text' argument benefit of non-bundling approaches is probably underappreciated. But your style is best for articles like your Submarine Telegraph Company, where every cite is to a book or a journal article and is identified by an author and a page number.  Very regular to follow, and straighforward to look up in the bibliography.  As one starts including sources that are newspapers articles, magazine pieces, web pages, etc., which are often lacking authors and/or page numbers and/or clear ways of identifying, that approach starts to break down.  Inventing author stand-ins like "Plarr's author" or "BMJ obituary writer" seems like a really awkward work-around.  For this article, I think the bundled, direct-footnote-to-cite approach is just more reader-friendly.  Wasted Time R (talk) 19:23, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
 * As you've presented a rationale specific to this article (rather than a global "I don't like it"), and as this has been so controversial, I'm going to give way. But I'd appreciate it if this was done without using citation templates. SpinningSpark 17:13, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Goal was intelligibility
I inadvertently started this by trying to clean up the way citations were called in this article. Frankly, the whole "first look down at the References section and then look further down at the Bibliography section" is awful. I think references should be in-line and clear. That's all I was going for. Pretend you are an average user without any baggage, and are coming to Wikipedia for some information on this guy; isn't this combined version more straightforward and understandable than this long version? — Molly-in-md (talk) 15:30, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Unless you have something to say that explicitly relates to this article in particular, if you just want to argue the toss about which is the better referencing style, then take it to my talk page and stop cluttering up this discussion. Better still, get the policy on referencing changed—if you can. SpinningSpark 15:50, 24 January 2019 (UTC)