Template talk:Dictionary of National Biography

Requesting some of the features in template:1911
Requesting some of the features like in template are taking and applied to the  template. Also, the ability to link through to the transcriptions that are very slowly taking place over at DNB @ Wikisource. Thx. billinghurst (talk) 04:39, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
 * To note for the Wikisource linked articles that I have added text and icon for WS. If this is too much, please get back to me and I will undo that edit. billinghurst  sDrewth  08:58, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Redundant text and formatting?
Do we still need the text , a publication now in the public domain. with the reference. It is pretty arcane these days, and less than ideal. I would also like to be looking to updating the template to better reflect a modern reference. The style here looks old. billinghurst  sDrewth  09:01, 9 July 2010 (UTC)


 * It is there to fend off "speedy deletions for copyvio", I suppose. I don't know that there has ever been any problem with that issue for the DNB. It certainly has happened to me for the Catholic Encyclopedia, where there are sites posting the CE text (and claiming copyright). Charles Matthews (talk) 07:23, 13 July 2010 (UTC)


 * It is also needed to comply with the guideline on plagiarism. The consensus is that if we copy text from another source even though it is not a copyright violation there is a moral obligation to give credit where credit is due. -- PBS (talk) 02:02, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Proposed changes
See Template talk:DNB Cite

I have recently upgraded the 1911 and Catholic templates. I would like to do the same to this one and minor changes to template talk:DNB Cite so that this one can call template talk:DNB Cite instead of calling directly cite encyclopedia.

To do this I propose
 * 1) to alter this template to use wstitle= as well as the current settings.
 * 2) Alter the documentation to only show wstitle.
 * 3) Run AWB on the ~2100 instances of this template and alter them to use wstitle.
 * 4) Once that is complete alter this template so that it looks similar to 1911 and catholic.
 * 5) Update the documentation to reflect the changes.

Comment welcome -- PBS (talk) 02:02, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Done 1 and 2 -- PBS (talk) 11:48, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Done 3 4 5 -- PBS (talk) 11:56, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

More features
Should more features be added, so as with 1911, this can be used for a number of purposes, including combining attribution with citations? (See the first table at Template:1911/doc.) &mdash;innotata 14:18, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I'll get around to them when I have been through all the current entries converting them to use wstitle. But I am adding a few more now because in some articles both DNB and DNB Cite} have been used in general reference lists AFAICT because the DNB did not allow for volume, and author. So I am adding those to template now (so when I delete DNB Cite}s editors who watch those articles will still see the information but in the DNB template. The rest will follow when I have finished the conversion job. -- PBS (talk) 01:36, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Done -- PBS (talk) 11:50, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Ref
Appear to get problems when using template without the first/last entry in getting an appropriate harv link for the short references. Is there a way to get this to work or does the template need tweaking to pass a harvid though, if set, rather than the default harv. Keith D (talk) 23:55, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I have changed the template to allow any value to be passed through the ref= parameter, but it still defaults to "harv". Do you have any examples where there is no named editor for an article? If so we should probably consider setting default values for the editor-last field so that there is always a last name to be used with a harv template. -- PBS (talk) 17:23, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the change. The article that I stumbled across to prompt this was William Vernon Harcourt (scientist) where I could not get the harv link to work. Keith D (talk) 18:25, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing out where it was a problem. I have now fixed the code in cite DNB (which DNB calls) so that links created by harvnb etc to the the editor fields work as expected, so you will not have to jump through this hoop again. I have left the ability to override the ref= parameter in both templates because it may still be needed for times when the author and year are the same for two different citations.-- PBS (talk) 12:14, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Unnamed parameters
Recently I was looking at the maintenance category Category:Articles incorporating DNB template with an unnamed parameter there were about half a dozen entries. In every case the entries were there because there is a template on German Wikipedia called DNB (The functionality of the template is reproduced on English Wikipedia with German National Library portal), because the text containing DNB had been used as part of a translation from German wikipedia. Currently there is no warning message when this happens.

There is a similar problem with ADB this is handled with:

I do not think this is a desirable solution for this template as this template is used in nearly 8,000 instances and the number of mistaken entries was only about half a dozen out of nearly 3,000 using the template German National Library portal, so instead I propose that this template handle an unnamed parameter by passing it on through to cite encyclopedia which puts out an error message which involves no overhead for this template:

as some of the fields are filled automatically what will appear is:

If that error message appears and the person who has ported the text from a German article, looks a this template for guidance they will see a sentence at the to of the documentation pointing them to German National Library portal.

-- PBS (talk) 17:10, 24 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I just emptied the category again. There were four instances, all due to improper copying from the German Wikipedia. I suggest that the template be modified to simply print out a large red error message when it sees an unnamed parameter, something like "improper use of DNB template. Did you mean DNB-IDN?" -Arch dude (talk) 06:02, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Section parameter
I have added a "section" parameter as an option. This is because if the Wikisource DNB articles had followed the EB1911 article format and made all the articles sub articles of "DNB00/", instead of "article name (DNB00)", then all that would be needed was to add "#section name to the wstitle=name (wstitle=name#section name) but that will not work because the template would construct that as "name" not what is wanted name (DNB00). This is now possible by using the new section parameter:
 * "Wynn, John (DNB00)" which can be accessed thus:

-- PBS (talk) 16:40, 22 September 2018 (UTC)