Talk:Robert Frascino/Archive 1

Progress
The article is a bit skimpy right now, and I'll be pressed for time during the next few days, but I will be in and out adding things to the article when possible. By the weekend, I'll have time to add a substantial amount of information. Fear not about the jumpy quality of the prose and unevenly developed sections. They will be taken care of shortly. Armadillopteryxtalk 01:15, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Is there a reason to have purple and green quotes? AlbertBowes (talk) 18:03, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I chose those colors because I felt they fit with the article. There's no rule or anything like that. Do you feel that they should be changed? Armadillopteryxtalk 19:53, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Refs
I've copied and pasted the discussion regarding references from my talk page. I'd like to discuss further changes here.

Hi,

Regarding the reference format, let's make it very clear. You wrote the article, you decide on the style. You are free to revert my edits.

Having said that, I always favor cite templates ;-). Here are my reasons:
 * Style can change on the future as a result of the community consensus. If you hard-encoded it, somebody will have to manually change it afterwards. Template are future proof.
 * Using templates encode references in a machine-readable format allowing bots to do some tedious work. Bots are not perfect but very helpful.
 * It make easy to translate it into other wikis. English is not my mother tongue and I contribute to Spanish and French wikis too. Templates always help.
 * Hopefully in a near future, citation style will be user defined. I prefer Harvard style due to my scientific background. Others may prefer the Chicago style. Why choose if we could have both? This is only possible if you use templates.
 * Using templates makes you focus on content not its formatting. Moreover, Cite web can be easily filled from the wiki editing bar. Why complicate editing?

Coming back to your article, not all the citations are web citations IMHO. Some were journal/news citations, some were pure web citations. That's why I took the liberty to change some reference coding. Take care --Alberto Fernandez Fernandez (talk) 16:55, 17 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi,


 * I understand your reasons. I'm more than happy to hear your opinion about this, because even though I did write the article, I don't own it, and I'd really just like it to be as strong as possible.


 * In the few articles I've written, if a change were ever implemented through consensus, I would rather make the necessary adjustments manually. This is because bots are generally very helpful, but I have seen bots damage refs in some articles. This is mostly because, exactly as you've said, the citations come from various places: the web, newspapers, journals, etc. However, bots that correct italics do not differentiate between pure web sources and the others. The problem lies in the fact that names of websites in the "work" parameter should not be italicized, whereas most other types of "work" should be italicized. So when you de-italicize the "work" parameter intentionally, bots will sometimes reverse that and create an error in the ref.


 * If you'll notice, the format I use when handwriting the refs is copied exactly from the output of the template. So the final product of template citations and mine is actually the same. I use MLA citation format for my off-wiki work, but I do stay faithful to the template conventions here (minus the physical templates, of course). I still prefer this, but if you feel the templates are better, I'm willing to leave them for awhile. If you want to do that, I'll de-italicize web-only sources (e.g. The Body but not The New York Times) and see if the bots leave them alone.


 * Thanks, Armadillopteryxtalk 20:22, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I reverted your undo of my edits as discussion was not leading to your change. Nothing personal. I just wanted to record the lack of agreement. You reverted edits on journal/news source and web sources alike. From now on, feel free to adjust it to your taste. I leave it up to you. Have fun.--Alberto Fernandez Fernandez (talk) 18:27, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

From here, I'll say that your initial statement above ("You wrote the article, you decide on the style. You are free to revert my edits.") led me to respond with my reasoning for changing things back. I waited three days for a response from you, and I saw from your contributions that you had been on Wikipedia during that time. As you chose not to respond to me with further reasoning to use the ref template, I reverted the changes assuming that either you were no longer interested in this discussion or you were okay with the suggestions. If you had voiced an opinion to the contrary, I would not have reverted. However, I wish you had resumed discussion before simply reverting my actions and claiming this was just to record lack of consensus. I think we'd both like consensus, so why don't we talk it out here and come to clearer understanding of how we'd like this done?

Also, to respond to your statement that I reverted work on journal/news sources and web sources alike, as I've stated above, I prefer to do all citations manually. There's no reason not to be consistent, and as I have a reason for wanting at least one source done without templates, they might as well all be written the same way. As I've also stated above, the output and the manual referencing I did are identical, so I don't see any reason to change it. Please let me know what you think about this. If you don't answer, I see no reason not to revert. If you answer, I'm more than happy to continue talking with you. Armadillopteryxtalk 19:22, 20 October 2011 (UTC)