Template talk:Cite Americana

The long and the short of it
Bob, I am reverting the change. The default should include the editor. Add a short version if you do not want it included as per cite Catholic Encyclopedia short = which also has some code you can use as an example. -- PBS (talk) 20:22, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The code used in cite Catholic Encyclopedia is
 * --PBS (talk) 09:26, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
 * To what purpose is your proposed default? How so should?  Just because one template does it that way doesn't mean they all need to, especially if it is a poor default, as it is in this case.  This editor is not a useful piece of information most of the time.  What is needed is the article title, the publication name and the date.  General information like publisher, location etc. is not necessary most of the time for a well known publication that has an accompanying link.  I think you would do well to quote some kind of policy if you want to make this point, and bring more people into this discussion instead of making covert changes.  I don't think there is any kind of policy that long should be the default, and I will revert your change, especially since I am the most frequent user of this template. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 20:46, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
 * --PBS (talk) 09:26, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
 * To what purpose is your proposed default? How so should?  Just because one template does it that way doesn't mean they all need to, especially if it is a poor default, as it is in this case.  This editor is not a useful piece of information most of the time.  What is needed is the article title, the publication name and the date.  General information like publisher, location etc. is not necessary most of the time for a well known publication that has an accompanying link.  I think you would do well to quote some kind of policy if you want to make this point, and bring more people into this discussion instead of making covert changes.  I don't think there is any kind of policy that long should be the default, and I will revert your change, especially since I am the most frequent user of this template. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 20:46, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
 * --PBS (talk) 09:26, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
 * To what purpose is your proposed default? How so should?  Just because one template does it that way doesn't mean they all need to, especially if it is a poor default, as it is in this case.  This editor is not a useful piece of information most of the time.  What is needed is the article title, the publication name and the date.  General information like publisher, location etc. is not necessary most of the time for a well known publication that has an accompanying link.  I think you would do well to quote some kind of policy if you want to make this point, and bring more people into this discussion instead of making covert changes.  I don't think there is any kind of policy that long should be the default, and I will revert your change, especially since I am the most frequent user of this template. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 20:46, 20 April 2011 (UTC)


 * See WP:CITE. Just because the book is well known to some does not mean that it is well known to most. -- PBS (talk) 21:11, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

I think we can narrow down the problem. I see this template as one to be used as it is in Arthur William à Beckett where it is desirable to show all the information (at a practical level if the article author is not given, people can still use the template harv to link to the editor in short citations). You (Bob), I am guessing are thinking of situations like Encyclopedia. Is that correct? -- PBS (talk) 09:26, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

I have made some additional edits to the article Arthur William à Beckett which along with improving the article also illustrates the reason why editor is a useful default addition to the template if it is going to be used as a cited source in an article. -- PBS (talk) 13:58, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

No, you (Philip) are not correct. The difference I see in your two examples is that Encyclopedia magnifies the nonsense of having such elaborate information, and emphasizes the advantages of summarizing. I think of the citation as an executive summary. Especially with a very accessible source at Wikisource, and/or a Wikipedia article on the book, the typical reader I think would benefit from not having to scan through the editor, the publisher, the publisher's location etc. etc. and just look at the article title and the name of the book and the year (and the author if there is one given). If they want to check things out more closely, everything is behind the one or two links supplied. For an obscure citation, for a work from some modern shepherd's press on a Swiss mountain top who's work does not have a Wikipedia article, all that other stuff may be very useful for tracking it down; for a citation from a work with a Wikipedia article, and even more so when the text is in Wikisource, all that other information just clutters the article page up needlessly. For your Men of the Time citation, everything beyond "(eleventh ed.)" is typically not of interest, and even that stuff is needlessly prolonged: why not "(11th ed.)"? With just the essentials, it would fit up in the citation itself easily, and all the techy extras could be dispensed with. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 22:48, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

The Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch article I think illustrates the contrast between a succinct citation and the more wordy one. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 23:49, 23 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Two points the first is what should the reference contain if the sources is a PD source but not on Wikisource? For example there is Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, but most of the dictionary is yet to be ported, but there are 200 articles on Wikipedia that use some text from it.


 * In the example you have given (Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch), you have provided a very specific solution:


 * What happens if another source is added and it is standard copy right source. How then would you rearrange the inline citations and the references section in that article to handle that? -- PBS (talk) 15:35, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
 * What happens if another source is added and it is standard copy right source. How then would you rearrange the inline citations and the references section in that article to handle that? -- PBS (talk) 15:35, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
 * What happens if another source is added and it is standard copy right source. How then would you rearrange the inline citations and the references section in that article to handle that? -- PBS (talk) 15:35, 25 April 2011 (UTC)
 * What happens if another source is added and it is standard copy right source. How then would you rearrange the inline citations and the references section in that article to handle that? -- PBS (talk) 15:35, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

February 2012
What is the purpose of the changes which have approximately doubled up the number of lines of code? -- PBS (talk) 01:41, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Not useful that I can see. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 13:31, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Future development
Reworking this template to use both Cite encyclopedia and the new Cite wikisource seems misguided to me. Developing on a base of one general template seems the way to go for intelligible code, and Cite encyclopedia seems the most logical one. True Cite Americana does facilitate citations to Wikisource, but it also facilitates citations of web sources, and adding Cite web to the mix would make as little sense as adding Cite wikisource. The latter template could be useful for Wikisource citations for articles or projects that don't have their own citation templates. Also please think about developing in the sandbox for complex changes. I think a more useful route would be to add a parameter like  to Cite if it isn't already there. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 13:31, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

P.S. My comment on the revert saying the code of this template was swallowing bullets on succeeding items in itemized lists seems incorrect. This seems to be a spontaneous change in Cite Appletons' that I have no explanation for. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 13:40, 20 February 2012 (UTC) Well now I have an explanation. It was a bot problem unrelated to changes in Cite Americana. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 14:35, 20 February 2012 (UTC)


 * There was a similar development at Template:ODNBweb like cite wikisource I think that development is misguided, because it duplicates much of the underlying code of cite encyclopedia or which ever of the standard "template:cite ..."s is used. If cite wikisource was rewritten as a generalised wrapper around cite encyclopedia then it would make some sense. But the overhead in maintenance work of keeping the current cite wikisource in line with the more widely used cite templates is in my opinion not worth it. However I noticed that there is a problem with the current coding of this particular template. The standard templates do not handle empty parameters correctly so the line:
 * is broken as it sets the parameter author to an empty string. It should be written like this:
 * so that author is not set as an empty string. -- PBS (talk) 06:55, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * so that author is not set as an empty string. -- PBS (talk) 06:55, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
 * so that author is not set as an empty string. -- PBS (talk) 06:55, 21 February 2012 (UTC)




 * displays as:




 * I guess this is what you are talking about, but I don't see a problem. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 00:17, 22 February 2012 (UTC)


 * At the moment it is not a problem because there is no "last=" parameter, but have you forgotten the problem in Cite DNB with the author= parameter (see Template talk:Cite DNB It has to do with this test:
 * In Cite encyclopedia if any of the variables are passed in before author then author will not be reached. ie if |last= was passed into this template as an empty parameter then even though author had a value it would not be set because it would never be reached. Therefore it is not a good idea to pass in empty parameters because they rely on the ordering of tests in the templates called from the higher one. Now this is not a problem if cite encyclopedia is called directly from within an article because people do not usually choose to in empty parameters (and if they do then the results are unpredictable). But for a template like this if it sets empty parameters it may have unforeseen consequences, because even if it works properly today, it may not work properly if the underlying template is changed in the future. Therefore it is better coding not to pass empty parameter strings into other templates. -- PBS (talk) 02:33, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
 * In Cite encyclopedia if any of the variables are passed in before author then author will not be reached. ie if |last= was passed into this template as an empty parameter then even though author had a value it would not be set because it would never be reached. Therefore it is not a good idea to pass in empty parameters because they rely on the ordering of tests in the templates called from the higher one. Now this is not a problem if cite encyclopedia is called directly from within an article because people do not usually choose to in empty parameters (and if they do then the results are unpredictable). But for a template like this if it sets empty parameters it may have unforeseen consequences, because even if it works properly today, it may not work properly if the underlying template is changed in the future. Therefore it is better coding not to pass empty parameter strings into other templates. -- PBS (talk) 02:33, 22 February 2012 (UTC)