Template talk:ME-ref/Archive 1

List of References
Attached below is a list of all the references which can be called with this template.

Please place any thoughts on changing the template to reference alternate versions for any of these books below. --CBDunkerson 01:45, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Listing articles that use references
Many, many thanks for all your work on this, Conrad. Further to my desire to use these templates to find all articles referencing an individual book, I have realised that I will be able to (sort of) use "What links here" to find articles referencing the books, as long as each book has its own Wikipedia article. Will this be workable? If not, I would like to consider having separate templates for each book. Will this require a lot of extra work? Carcharoth 08:50, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * No, 'What links here' would not include the books linked on the page unless the articles for those books had links to that page. I'll redesign the template so that it calls sub-templates with the actual reference text in them. Then you can check 'What links here' from those sub-templates to get all pages referencing that book. --CBDunkerson 13:25, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * But it would work for books that had articles? For example, for Letters, you could examine this list here. I think this would work well (with a few false hits) for my "general references to any editions of a book", and the templates would work well for "references using a specific edition of a book". Of course, this system still falls down when the book doesn't have an article. I tried doing what links here for sections of a page, but it doesn't seem to work. Carcharoth 21:13, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, because the references include links to the books you can get 'What links here' from that... even if there isn't an article on the book. For instance, Special:Whatlinkshere/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_A_Reader's_Companion provides a list even though there is currently no article on that book. --CBDunkerson 21:53, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Wonderful! For most books that should work very well. Please don't worry about getting the "What links here" to work for the templates, unless you still want to do that. I am quite happy to use "What links here" for the book articles or red-links. Carcharoth 11:32, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

More abbreviations
How about "Biography" for Carpenter's biography, "S" for Silmarillion? Carcharoth 09:00, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll add these if there are no objections. I actually considered both, but didn't know how common 'S' was as an abbreviation for Silmarillion and wondered if there might be objections to promoting Carpenter's biography as THE 'Biography' (though it is generally recognized as such). --CBDunkerson 13:25, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * It seems to be fairly commonly accepted that Carpenter's Biography is the biography, though not definitive (maybe that will come later, with the passing of the years, if another biographer is allowed access to the papers again). I believe it is also the only official one. I've seen a couple of other books with varying amounts of biographical material, such as "Master of Middle-earth" (Kocher), "J. R. R. Tolkien - Architect Of Middle-Earth" (Grotta), one by Michael White (can't remember title), but they all seem to rehash material from Carpenter's Biography. The "Tolkien and the Great War" (Garth) book does have new biographical material not found in Carpenter, so that should probably be on the list. I'll try and dig out the details sometime. Carcharoth 20:04, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

More books
The talk page list above includes the Annotated Hobbit, which is not on the listing on the template page. Some suggestions for other books: the "Reader's Companion"; "Tolkien and the Great War", the various books including Tolkien's other works and essays (particularly 'On Fairy Stories', 'Farmer Giles', 'Smith of Wootton Major', 'Leaf by Niggle', 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil'). Might it be best to have a standard way to reference these essays/other stories that are published in several different collections?

Also, would it be silly to have references to the books and chapters of LotR and the other books, or at least examples of the way we would like people to refer to these books/chapters if they want to? Carcharoth 09:10, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * The Annotated Hobbit is just a version of The Hobbit with annotations and additional text. Most notably it contains the text from all different versions of The Hobbit which have been released and thus is the one book which can be referenced to cover any particular version of the story. Therefor I listed it under 'TH' / 'The Hobbit' as the standard reference.
 * I've got a stack of other books here which I was planning to put in this morning, but now will hold off until after the design updates. On standard referencing of sub-sections within each book... I think it would be difficult to cover all reasonable formats. Maybe we could write suggestions up on the project 'Standards' page. --CBDunkerson 13:25, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I think some people will want to reference editions of The Hobbit, rather than the Annotated Hobbit. In particular, people might want to reference just the latest copy of The Hobbit, that most readers should be able to access. And then use the Annotated Hobbit reference for all that earlier edition material? Not sure yet about the other stuff. Carcharoth 20:07, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

This page takes ages to load!!
There are lots of templates on this page, but some articles may have even more templates than this! This will mean that the pages will take a long time to load (like this page) and place strain on the Wikimedia servers (I think). Is this a bad thing? Carcharoth 09:13, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Yup. I've got an idea for re-designing it which should process faster. It's not as 'pretty' code wise, but I'm working on it now and we will see if it fixes the load time issue. --CBDunkerson 13:25, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Much faster - thanks! Carcharoth 20:08, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Update Made
Ok, I made the design updates. I was still getting a slow load time though... not sure why since the new design is very similar to what I've used in other templates which load quickly. --CBDunkerson 14:08, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Made a further adjustment which seems to have largely resolved the loading speed issue. --CBDunkerson 16:33, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Subst?
Because all the sub-templates go through this one they all end up being linked to any page which references any book on the list. I've come up with a way to link directly to the sub-templates (allowing proper 'What links here' for each book), but it would require that this template always be substituted. That is, 5 would evaluate to ... this would remove all evaluation time problems and allow 'What links here' from each sub-template, but are people ok always using 'subst' with this template? Under the proposed method it would produce a warning message (possibly followed by a block of junk if I can't figure out how to suppress that) if not substituted. Let me know if you think using 'subst' is ok. --CBDunkerson 15:56, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I've been looking at the templates coding, and I think I'm slowly beginning to get the hang of it... :-) But in any case, I've thought of a problem... What I want to do is go to a general template for FotR (say) and click "What links here" to get all articles referencing that book. The problem is, that this will only find links to references using that edition. What if someone has used another edition? Or should we be working on the assumption that all references will be "corrected" to a single set of editions? - I would say we shouldn't do this. Is it possible to have subtemplates that allow people to choose whether they reference a US or UK edition of FotR. At the moment, most of these templates won't work for me because I have mainly UK editions. Anyway, I'm going to list details below of the books that I would be using, in case this helps, but I think the system needs to be flexible enough to encompass different editions, while still allowing someone to pick up a book and check all references using that template. Carcharoth 20:27, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * What I was trying to do, based on the discussion here, was to come up with a list of 'standard references' which can be used in most cases. Ideally we would pick editions which are widely used and/or have page numbering consistent with many other editions. That's the purpose of the list above... to show what I put in so we can discuss whether these make sense to be the 'standards'. Note that if you are just citing the book in general or a section (Letter #113, FotR 'A Long Expected Party') rather than a specific page number the edition listed doesn't matter.


 * In this case, we should reference the books people can go out and get today in bookshops and libraries - the "latest" editions, or my (4) below. Carcharoth 11:40, 16 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Also, HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin editions of Tolkien books very often have the same page numbering and thus can be used interchangeably. The problem I foresee with including multiple editions is that it will become exceedingly difficult to remember all the references - if we have a dozen versions of Lord of the Rings how do we sort out the abbreviations for each?


 * I think the idea is to list all the editions and abbreviations somewhere, and tell people they should work out which ones are suitable for their editions, then they can make their own little list of abbreviations to kepp handy for themselves. The page numbering page you mention above would also help with this. Really, I think we need to find a website somewhere that has done all this work already. I seem to remember a few, but don't have time to dig out the URL now. Carcharoth 11:40, 16 April 2006 (UTC)


 * To address different page numbering issues we can put conversion charts on the sub-template pages to show how to convert page numbers from one edition to another. --CBDunkerson 22:14, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * more comments inserted above Carcharoth 11:40, 16 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Multiple editions don't really work, I agree, unless you set it up carefully (as below). The trouble is, while I want to use these templates, I would want them to reference the editions I have. It might be best to have at least a few sets of these templates: (1) Templates referencing the books without specifying date of edition, publisher, or ISBN - let the Wikipedia editor fill those in or use these basic templates to set up templates for their editions; (2) Templates for the first edition of each book (might be useful); (3) Templates for a standard set of books considered to be the most widely available editions; (4) Templates for a standard set of books considered to be the definitive editions - possibly splitting this into (a) US and (b) UK editions. I think that should cover most cases. I would then use a combination of all these, depending on which editions I was using.


 * (1) seems self-explanatory; (2) should be fairly easy to do; (3) should be some form of the second edition of LotR that has the most consistent page-numbering across different editions; (4) should, IMO, be the very latest editions published by HaperCollins and Houghton Mifflen (ie. the 50th anniversary 2005 edition). There should also be references to the latest single-volume editions published by them.


 * To explain all this, a page should lay out these four schemes, and explain that there are many other editions of LotR. It should also explain that while this may seem confusing, it is likely that the volume you are holding will have the same page numbering - so (3) or (4) should be chosen, depending on how old your edition is.


 * I would, tentatively, call these schemes: (1) General reference; (2) First editions; (3) Second edition of LotR/Silmarillion; (4) 50th Anniversary Edition of LotR.


 * As for 'The Hobbit', I would set up reference templates for general use, for the first edition, for the latest available (US and UK) and for the Annotated Hobbit (are there different editions?).


 * Having said that, there is probably no rush to set this up. But I think all the templates should be transcluded for now, in case there are problems. Is the substing really needed? Carcharoth 11:17, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Examples of UK and other non-US editions
I've copied these off a database I made of some of the Tolkien editions I have. I somehow ended up with some French and German editions - I guess these are not so important for an English-language encyclopedia. But I'm wondering how the UK books can be incorporated into the template referencing system? The order of the columns is: Author, Date of publication of first edition (unfortunately I didn't record the date of publication of the editions I have - silly me), title, publisher, ISBN. Will add a bit later. Carcharoth 20:45, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

OK. Here they are. If anyone wants to separate out the columns again, I replaced the tab symbol with two spaces " ". I suppose it might be possible to use the ISBNs to generate a year of publication, as, just to make this clear, I only recorded the publication year as the year the first edition was published. Carcharoth 21:21, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1937  The Hobbit  Harper Collins  0 261 10330 X
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1937  The Hobbit  Unwin  0 04 823188 6
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1949  Farmer Giles Of Ham  Unwin  0 04 823233 5
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1954  The Fellowship of the Ring  Unwin  0 04 823185 1
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1954  The Two Towers  Unwin  0 04 823186 X
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1954  The Fellowship of the Ring  Unwin  0 04 823112 6
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1955  The Return of the King  Harper Collins  0 261 10237 0
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1966  La Communaute de l'Anneau  Pocket  2 266 10798 4
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1966  Le Retour du Roi  Pocket  2 266 10800 X
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1966  Les Deux Tours  Pocket  2 266 10799 2
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1968  The Lord of the Rings  George Allen & Unwin  0 04 823087 1
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1972  Le seigneur des anneaux: les deux tours  Christian Bourgois  2 253 01208 4
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1975  Tree and Leaf, Smith of Wootton Major, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth  Unwin  0 04 820016 6
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1977  The Silmarillion  Unwin  0 04 823230 0
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1977  The Silmarillion  Unwin  0 04 823153 3
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1977  The Silmarillion  Harper Collins  0 261 10366 0
 * Humphrey Carpenter 1977  J. R. R. Tolkien  George Allen & Unwin  0 04 928037 6
 * Christopher Tolkien (Ed.) 1980  Unfinished Tales  Unwin  0 04 823179 7
 * Humphrey Carpenter (Ed.) 1981  The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien  Harper Collins  0 261 10265 6
 * Tom Shippey 1982  The Road To Middle-Earth  Harper Collins  0 261 10275 3
 * Christopher Tolkien 1983  The Book Of Lost Tales - Part 1  Harper Collins  0 261 10222 2
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1983  The Monsters and the Critics  Harper Collins  0 261 10263 X
 * Christopher Tolkien 1984  The Book Of Lost Tales - Part 2  Harper Collins  0 261 10214 1
 * Christopher Tolkien 1985  The Lays Of Beleriand  Harper Collins  0 261 10226 5
 * Christopher Tolkien 1986  The Shaping Of Middle-earth  Harper Collins  0 261 10218 4
 * Christopher Tolkien 1987  The Lost Road And Other Writings  Harper Collins  0 261 10225 7
 * Christopher Tolkien 1988  The Return Of The Shadow  Harper Collins  0 261 10224 9
 * Christopher Tolkien 1989  The Treason Of Isengard  Harper Collins  0 261 10220 6
 * Christopher Tolkien 1990  The War Of The Ring  Harper Collins  0 261 10223 0
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1990  Tales From The Perilous Realm  Harper Collins  0 261 10342 3
 * Christopher Tolkien 1992  Sauron Defeated  Harper Collins  0 261 10305 9
 * Christopher Tolkien 1993  Morgoth's Ring  Harper Collins  0 261 10300 8
 * Christopher Tolkien 1994  The War Of The Jewels  Harper Collins  0 261 10324 5
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1994  Poems From The Lord Of The Rings  HarperCollins  0 261 10312 1
 * Christopher Tolkien 1996  The Peoples Of Middle-earth  Harper Collins  0 261 10348 2
 * J. R. R. Tolkien 1998  Roverandom  Harper Collins  0 00 714911 5
 * Tom Shippey 2001  J. R. R. Tolkien - Author Of The Century  Harper Collins  0 261 10401 2
 * Christopher Tolkien 2002  The History Of Middle-earth Index  Harper Collins  0 00 713743 5

Adding editions to these templates
Would it be possible to have a step-by-step guide to adding new editions to these templates? I think it would involve creating a sub-template page, plus some instructions on the front page, and then updating the "higher-level" templates. I'd be happy to add some editions if that would help. Carcharoth 11:35, 16 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Let's settle what we are going to include first. I'm very concerned about having multiple editions of each book because it just seems extremely complicated and then becomes impossible to standardize the page numbering. If we use a single set of references then all page numbers consistently refer to that edition. Obviously this is ideal for people who have editions consistent with that page numbering scheme (and thus I think that we should pick editions consistent with the most widely available page numbering scheme), but I believe it is beneficial even for people whose editions have different page numbering... because it would then be consistently different. Instead of every reference using a different set of page numbers they would all be based on one set and we could have conversion formulas for various other editions. --CBDunkerson 11:47, 25 April 2006 (UTC)


 * OK. I agree that having multiple editions is not workable, but I do think that there should be templates for more than one edition. There should be a standard edition, but we should also recognise that this may change in the future. We should have a set of current, standard references, but leave enough flexibility to update this later. Also, people will always ignore a template system and just reference the books they have. I'll try to expand what I said above about several sets of templates, using the examples I can find. Carcharoth 13:57, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion
Let's start collecting information on various editions of the books. If we get full details for every edition we can find and the page numbering scheme we can see which page numberings are most common and set up the conversion formulas. Comparative page numbering is usually handled by listing the page number for the start of each chapter in a given edition and then devising a formula which evaluates to one set of 'chapter pages' when the other set is plugged into it... this can be off by a page or two for individual entries, but is usually quite accurate. We can use the talk pages of the individual reference templates. I'll build a framework and then put in some examples this afternoon. --CBDunkerson 11:57, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Please see Template:ME-ref/TH. I listed all of the editions of The Hobbit I have and the two Carcharoth listed above (please add page numbers). Unfortunately, thus far only two of them use the same page numbering. Most of the books will have greater consistency, but this one and LotR are going to be all over the map. I didn't put in conversion formulas yet because we don't have an agreed standard to convert from. --CBDunkerson 23:37, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Looks great! I'll add the information from my editions later. Carcharoth 13:59, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Found those websites I was talking about with page number conversions - see here and here. I remembered that last one as being more helpful, but in fact most of the calculations seem to be hidden in a 'black box'... Actually, after a bit more ferretting around, I found a webpage that this guy refers to as "The Gory Details"! See here. Not sure how helpful this is, but it has reminded me of the scale of the problem. I do think that somewhere, we could put in Wikipedia a list of all the Tolkien editions that have been published (starting with the ones in the US and UK). It is a long list, but it should be doable. Carcharoth 13:16, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

More information about Tolkien editions
The two websites I know of with good information about the various editions are: The Tolkien Collector (books section) and the excellent website by Mike Brinza Mike's Tolkien Resources (JRRT section) and in particular the gallery of covers from different UK and US editions Carcharoth 13:51, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Stug (Mike Brinza) is an old friend and I've seen 'The Tolkien Collector' before - I agree that those are the best resources for general info about various editions which I have seen. The 'Descriptive Bibliography' book also has extensive info on the various editions. These would be good for updating things like Early American editions of The Hobbit & English-language editions of The Hobbit, but to work out page number conversions we'll probably need the actual books or things like the 'gory details' page you listed above. It might make sense to merge Early American editions of The Hobbit and the page numbering stuff I started at Template:ME-ref/TH into English-language editions of The Hobbit to have a single spot for all info on different editions. However, only the 'main' books are likely to have articles detailing the editions like this. --CBDunkerson 14:23, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Found old references page...
While doing some housekeeping (see Category:WikiProject Middle-earth templates), I discovered WikiProject_Middle-earth/Templates and the section WikiProject_Middle-earth/Templates concerning references. Is that just an old, never-implemented structure that is being superceded by this one? Carcharoth 15:16, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes. I originally copied alot of stuff over from another Wikiproject to get the initial setup for the Middle-earth one. That reference structure was used and looked interesting so I included it, but the various sub-templates called by this one are essentially the same system and this template then 'wraps' them all together. --CBDunkerson 18:57, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Question
This may be a silly question, but is there a reason why there is a sign saying 'Improper reference format' on top of the page? — Mir  l   e   n   00:58, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
 * That's the default result of the template if no parameters are set, as is always the case on the template page itself. If it is confusing it could be hidden by putting 'noinclude' tags around the code at the top. --CBD 18:10, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

New entries
Can we have entries for


 * The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology

and


 * The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide

please. Thu 22:11, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Can you provide authors, ISBNs, etc.? -- Jordi· ✆ 08:50, 3 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Chronology = Chr, Reader's Guide = RG. -- Jordi· ✆ 08:56, 3 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Done what I can, Amazon only has one of the ISBN numbers (I own the UK edition). Thu 09:40, 3 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Are these out? I've had them on pre-order with Amazon for a couple of years now, but haven't seen anything yet. Last I heard Wayne said they had been delayed by work on the revised edition of LotR and then the reader's companion and other projects. I didn't think they were going to be available for a few more months yet. Looks like Amazon still has them listed as 'forthcoming', but I've had to order some of these books from the UK because they often come out a month or two earlier there. --CBD 13:05, 3 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Just found them on amazon.co.uk I think, in hardcover. Chronology (v1), Reader's Guide (v2), Combo (v1+v2). Only very few copies left. -- Jordi· ✆ 14:46, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Deprecate this!
I appreciate the ingenuity that went into this template, but it is horrible in terms of server load. It should always be subst:ed, with a huge warning sign showing up whenever somebody transcludes it. Also, it is a very (very) bad idea to give the full bibliographic info in each footnote, as this template encourages. Look at the footnotes in JRRT. This is not what we want! Instead of tons of footnotes each reading "Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher (eds.) (1981). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, no. XY. ISBN 0-395-31555-7.", we want footnotes like "Letters no. XY", with one single entry giving full details. As it is, JRRT provides the reader with the ISBN of Letters more than twenty times over. dab (𒁳) 15:29, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Part of the reason for transcluding is to allow 'what links here' to be used to track the use of Tolkien references. WP:PERF says server load is not a problem. I agree that using the template more than once for the same book in an article is silly, but that is a separate issue. Carcharoth 12:06, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree that 'one use per book' should be the norm and indeed that was the way the Tolkien page was set up. That got lost when people started going nuts with 'every sentence must have a reference link'. The 'server load' of this template actually isn't that great, even when transcluded dozens of times... if used correctly it wouldn't be an issue at all. As to substitution... references could still be tracked from 'what links here' to the book titles, but there would be some false positives from links to the books in actual article text. The biggest reason to transclude rather than subst is actually to allow for 'updates'. There are some disputes about which version of each book to include... and these may change over time. For instance, right now someone is arguing that we shouldn't use the first edition LotR volumes because the library of congress online catalog doesn't go back far enough to list their LCC numbers. If people agree that this should be changed it can be and would immediately cycle down to all the pages using this. --CBD 13:18, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

LotR edition
I'm mystified why a 1987 edition is being used for these references. Why not the 1966/67 second edition or the 2005 edition. Thu 19:13, 30 August 2007 (UTC)


 * See the comment immediately above your own. Originally this template did use that earlier edition, but there were objections that it pre-dated the library of congress catalog system and thus it was changed to the earliest edition which is listed in that source and kept the page numbering scheme common to most versions before the 1990s. I've never really seen much point to the disagreements over which edition to use. It impacts page numbers, but in cases where there are dozens of different numbering schemes we shouldn't be using page numbers anyway. In rare cases we might be referencing some change to the text between editions (e.g. the rewrite of the Gollum chapter in later editions of The Hobbit), but in those few cases we should write out references to the relevant editions manually or use Template:Cite book. The idea of this template was to be a quick way to cite texts without having to look up all the publication info each time and try to have the default citations be to versions of the books which used the most widely distributed page numbering scheme. --CBD 11:45, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

additional field for the template
I've suggested at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Middle-earth that additional optional fields be added namely these


 * This refers to 'books' contained in a bound edition eg 'Quenta silmarilion' in Silmarilion,
 * ie Vol 1 in LOTR is the fellowship of the rings
 * This refers to 'books' contained in a bound edition eg 'Quenta silmarilion' in Silmarilion,
 * ie Vol 1 in LOTR is the fellowship of the rings
 * ie Vol 1 in LOTR is the fellowship of the rings
 * ie Vol 1 in LOTR is the fellowship of the rings
 * ie Vol 1 in LOTR is the fellowship of the rings
 * ie Vol 1 in LOTR is the fellowship of the rings

and any other anyone else can think of, these should be optional so as not to mess up current references. I've no idea how to alter templates or set them up so I can only push for this change. Thanks.87.102.5.137 11:37, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
 * or would also be an additional field

For example:

Leaving a full reference but with blank fields in a useful place (various positions within the project) can help cut down on workload for those that can copy and paste..87.102.5.137 12:40, 5 September 2007 (UTC)


 * What you are describing is very similar to the existing Template:Cite book. There you can input all the specific publication information for a particular edition. The idea of this template was to avoid the need to look up and retype that information every time by including it in pre-packaged form. It is much easier to type than the equivalent  (which, in fact, is exactly what Template:ME-ref/SILM contains). Rather than having to look up all of this information each time, retype it, and remember all the particular parameter names used by 'cite book' you just need to type 'Silm' to get the same result.
 * The primary concern usually raised is that the edition specified in the template may be different from the edition the person is looking at. However, in the vast majority of cases I don't think it matters. Most of Tolkien's books have one consistent page numbering scheme across all editions. The primary exceptions are The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but even there one numbering scheme stands out as being more common than any of the others. Too, as we have just been discussing, it is generally a good idea to cite chapters and sub-sections (which seldom vary by edition) rather than page numbers, to avoid confusion caused by different printing layouts.
 * If citing a specific edition does matter for a particular case then Template:Cite book is still available. Someone can even go to Template:ME-ref/SILM (or whichever) and copy the 'cite book' logic there to the target page and then adjust it to fit the specific edition they are citing.
 * One thing neither 'cite book' nor this template, which is really just a 'wrapper' for cite book on specific volumes, has is parameters for sub-sections like the above ' ', ' ', ' ', ' '... all of that type of information now just goes into the ' ' parameter. If we were to add these then each would have to be given a parameter name to distinguish which we were setting... so you'd need to use instead of  . Would it serve as well to just change the documentation to describe the single extra parameter as something like '' instead of ' '? --CBD 12:46, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually I was thinking 'Valaquenta' would be a sub_book like 'quenta silmarillion' but that's yet another issue.
 * Changing the documentation to encourage people to quote chapters, or what ever further info will be useful to find the page is the most important thing. If anyone can add the sub-fields I'd encourage that - as you note 'cite-book' doesn't have the specific fields needed to be much more useful.87.102.5.137 13:39, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

What I think is really needed is a non-edition-specific form of ME-ref, with a link to a page offering people options as to which edition they want to look it up in. Similar to the GeoHack option giving a list of maps for geocode co-ordinates. But then you will get people insisting on a specific edition being cited. Carcharoth 13:04, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
 * All I can say is that for the above to work it would need all the edition/year/publisher info to be able to convert one page number to another
 * OR unless everyone uses exactly the same version for referencing -
 * But that may be impossible - I've already found that my Silmari.. page numbers don't match those referenced - this may be a US/UK-Canada problem as there are two different publishers for these regions (can anyone confirm that).?87.102.5.137 13:43, 5 September 2007 (UTC)


 * A link to a page with all the different editions listed is certainly possible, but I see two problems (besides the enormous amount of work required to set it all up). First, as you note, it isn't a standard referencing system... all Wikipedia references to date include the publication info in the article itself. Second, I don't see how it would allow information to be looked up in the various editions... if a page number is supplied in the original template call then what edition does that apply to? To specify the edition in the template call, so that someone could then apply formulas from the list of editions to come up with an approximate page number in other copies, the template would need to include keywords for all possible editions... and the user would have to figure out exactly which one they have and look up the corresponding keyword.
 * A possible 'middle ground' would be to pick one edition for each 'page numbering scheme' we find on each book. That way people just need to check the table of contents to see what pages their chapters start on and compare those to the chapter start pages in the list of editions to find the code they should use and how to convert it to other numbering schemes. Still alot of work, especially on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but possibly achievable.
 * That said, I still think we are better off abandoning page numbers entirely in favor of citing sub-sections and thereby obviate any need to know which edition is being referenced in 99% of the cases. --CBD 00:18, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree. Let's just carry on with implementing the subsection system. Would it be OK to list the chapter names here, or would that breach copyright? Oh, and for a Wikipedia reference system that doesn't include the publication info in the article itself, see the way chemical data references are handled in the chemical elements infoboxes. eg. Hydrogen, where the infobox references link leads you to Chemical elements data references, with a typical page being Abundances of the elements (data page). Obviously something like that would be overkill here, but it shows some of the possibilities. Carcharoth 20:02, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Subsections?
The list of works for this template is getting rather long. Can we subdivide it? Primary works, biographical material, Christopher Tolkien's works, secondary works? Also, it might be helpful to archive this talk page. Discussion is ongoing at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Middle-earth (for more potential additions - I think the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia and Tolkien Studies should be added) and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Middle-earth/Standards. Carcharoth 07:32, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I had actually split the table displaying the works along similar lines prior to seeing this note. I added automatic archiving to the top of the page to start clearing out some of the older stuff. --CBD 14:54, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Harvard References
I am going to convert the sub-templates here from using and  to. For the most part this should have little or no apparent effect on the output. The primary difference will be that we can then use to place multiple citations to the same book in the text and have all of them link to a single reference about the book. Thus, 'ME-ref' will only be called once per book on each page rather than once per citation. --CBD 14:54, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Tweaks requested
Hurray! With the change from cite book to citation all those awful dots in the output are gone at last! However, this introduced a minor presentational bug: pp. now appears in the citation field, regardless of the exact reference. See for instance Túrin Turambar, where this pp. precedes not page numbers, but chapter headings. As far as I understand, the reason is that cite book does not include pp. into the default coding of the  parameter, but citation does. I was unable to get though the coding of the latter, but I suppose some other field can be used instead,  or something. In addition, maybe it would be better to remove  parameter? Every relevant article provides a link to J. R. R. Tolkien in the main text, and those pages that are unrelated to his legendarium but happen to reference his works, should in any case use the common  template instead of this.

And a weak proposal. Can a separate subtemplate referencing The Etymologies be created? This would benefit such articles as List of Middle-earth plants or List of Middle-earth weapons. Súrendil (talk) 19:35, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Support an Etymologies subtemplate. Not sure about the rest - the coding and parameters make my eyes glaze as well. I've dropped a note off for CBD to have a look. Carcharoth (talk) 12:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The 'pp.' bit was added to the citation template recently. Changing the parameter we use from 'pages' to 'at', 'place', or 'location' should take us back to the prior display formatting without the 'pp.'. I'm leaning towards 'location' because I think the placement of that is better than 'at' and clearer in intent than 'place'.
 * The 'authorlink' obviously makes sense for books by people other than Tolkien (e.g. Shippey, Hammond, Anderson, Carpenter, et cetera). I can see where it is 'redundant' for Tolkien's books, but it would seem inconsistent with general citation use to not include it. Don't feel strongly about it one way or the other though. Thoughts from others?
 * What should a template for 'The Etymologies' do other than the equivalent of or LROW ? It looks like the list pages cited above are currently doing the Etymologies citations 'manually', but I'd think they could use the 'LROW' templates. Creating separate templates would save on having to type out 'The Etymologies', but if that's the only goal I'd probably implement it as just a conditional statement to pre-pend 'The Etymologies' to the 'pages' parameter if the citation used were 'Etym' or somesuch. Would that cover it? --CBD 19:52, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing out the relevant piece of coding. 'at' seems quite acceptable for me; aren't 'place' and 'location' parameters intended for the place of publication, that is, for London/Boston?
 * No strong objection of course, just a list of references at the foot of a page that duplicate one another not only in wording but also in links always looked distracting to me.
 * Expanded ME-ref/LROW and ME-cite/LROW accordingly, tweaked others. See doc page for examples.
 * In addition, I was bold and added another parameter to ME-cite:, which enables to select another name for a note instead of "_ _". It's quite helpful if you need to enter something other than just page numbers, e.g. "Unfinished Tales, note 15 to Narn i Hîn Húrin" or "War of the Jewels, "The Wanderings of Húrin", plot-synopsis for Narn i Chîn Húrin, p. 256" (I have a "non-canon" pagination of UT and can't enter normal page numbers; and we should aim to provide chapter-references in any case), so that all this text is not duplicated in HTML coding. And you can link to the resulting note several times. PS  . CBD, you're genius! Súrendil (talk) 20:55, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I put in the 'at' parameter for everything. I had the 'location' thing mixed up between the 'Harv' and 'Citation' templates (it's section of the book in Harv, but geographic in 'Citation'). I tweaked the 'ETYM' stuff to use #switch rather than the double #ifeq. The name parameter is a very good addition. For some reason I had thought it couldn't be done without breaking the linking between the harvard citations and the full references... forgot that I hard-coded the reference name for those into each template of the pair rather than using the parameter. --CBD 13:29, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Subpages link
See here for a list of all subpages. Carcharoth (talk) 12:30, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Brackets
Since this template is intended to be used only in References section and not in-line, maybe it would be better to use harvnb instead of harv to get rid of brackets? (If anybody carries the revision, please also categorise the subtemplates to Category:Middle-earth source templates to keep track of them.) Súrendil (talk) 19:51, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Agree with categorisation of subtemplates (will do this now), but no opinion on the harvard reference things (cos I haven't looked in detail at it). Droppped a note off for CBD to have a look. Carcharoth (talk) 12:21, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Looking over the templates it seems like 'harv' is meant to be used to place templates inline in the text itself... though it is almost always used to put them in the references section instead. I agree that 'harvnb' looks better for those purposes and will update the templates to do so. The fact that this template is substituted will mean that this won't update existing usages, but those can be changed by adding 'nb' to the template calls on the pages themselves. --CBD 18:15, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Merge
I merged the ME-cite talk page and redirected the ME-source talk page here. This should help to consolidate discussion as the three templates are very closely inter-related. I'll add sub-pages links for both ME-ref and ME-cite to the documentation, which is also shared by all three templates. --CBD 12:51, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Minor bug
On the pretext of removing buggy linebreaks from ME-cite subtemplates, I've also tweaked them so that the reference link isn't assigned a name unless entered as a parameter. However, this revealed another bug that was seemingly present from the start, remaining unnoticed. Have a look at the wiki-coding of the doc page (as it now stands): appears in the resulting text of Letters, which doesn't specify the ref name, and of LROW , both within the ref name and, most surprisingly, after the text "entries..." However, it does not appear in LROW. The same bug was also present in Eagle (Middle-earth) before I removed it. This is not a result of recent edits - see Lothlórien page, where appears in the ref name for "A Gateway to Sindarin", which didn't specify the pages using the second parameter. This bug has no serious outcome on the resulting article, but is misleading in the wiki markup. It this a problem of piping ParserFunctions? and/or of quotation marks? and/or of coalescence of  bits? Súrendil (talk) 19:07, 26 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It's just a natural aspect of substitution. If a substituted template includes a parameter which isn't set you get the text of the parameter call (e.g. ) itself. With the original design it shouldn't have come up often because brief citations should almost always have a location in the text associated with them (otherwise it's more of a once off 'ME-ref' than a 'ME-cite'). However, even if it wasn't set the fact that the name of the book was pre-pended meant that it would still produce a reference name unique to that book for each page. With that pre-pended text removed every reference, regardless of what text it is from, is now named """" unless one of those two parameters is set. I'm not sure how the two sets of double quotation marks would work out. I'll look at some options for tweaking this. --CBD 11:34, 27 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok, now that I've looked into it we are actually dealing with three different issues here. First is the subst of the parameter as text as I described above. This can most clearly be seen when no second parameter is set and we get '|loc= ' in the output. Again, that was always present, but I expected the location to almost always be set and it doesn't produce anything 'incorrect'. The second issue is that the substituted #if: evaluation you added to each of the book sub-templates will not process as expected. It is always evaluating to true because it is treating the '' as text (and thus not blank) rather than a parameter to be evaluated. This is actually the same issue as above... substitution processes unset parameters as text in all cases. Though that also means that the values passed into the sub-templates will be things like the text ' {{{name|{{{3|}}} ' rather than blank if neither is set (which would again then evaluate the #if to 'true'). The third issue is a wacky bug with parserfunctions where sometimes it interprets conditional text as defining a previously unset parameter within that text - specifically, the '|name="  " is setting the 'name' parameter to the text " {{{name}}} ", which then sets the reference name to "" {{{name}}} "". Changing the parameter from 'name' to 'ref-name' or somesuch would avoid this.
 * All that said - the root problem here is that we cannot have a reference name only when a parameter is set with a substituted template. It either always has to set a reference name or never do so. We could make it conditional with a non-substituted template, but then these citations would take up alot more 'transclusion space' and people wouldn't know what ref names to re-use on subsequent citations unless they deciphered the template. Something could probably be set up to call one of two templates (with and without reference name) depending on whether a parameter was set, but then we'd always have to make any changes to both. I'm trying to think of a way to set up another 'utility' template like ME-source to handle this condition. Something might be possible, but I'll need more time to look at it. --CBD 12:48, 27 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I faked the system out by comparing {{uc:}} to {{{NAME|}}} . When substituted those evaluate to the same thing unless one of them is set. So long as nobody ever sets the 'NAME' (all caps) parameter the template will now set the ref name to either the 'name' parameter, if set, or the '1' parameter (name of the book) if 'name' is not set. The permutations if the 'NAME' parameter is set aren't too bad either... ref name ends up being either the text {{{name}}} or the value of parameter 1. So, {{subst:ME-cite|LetTers}} sets 'ref name=LetTers' and {{subst:ME-cite|Letters|name=Fred}} sets 'ref name=Fred'. That seem like a reasonable solution? --CBD 13:46, 27 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, I must first apologise for all the mess I've caused, and for the ages of wasted time. Please forgive my overbold edits; hopefully all this will teach me something. I've tweaked the templates once again to escape any of the issues described above. Per aspera ad astra... Súrendil (talk) 21:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)