User:Lexein/What I did to your citations

If you've come here to find out what I did to your carefully constructed citations, first know that it was done in good faith, mostly because the citations were probably not formatted, or were formatted inconsistently, and I couldn't determine which format should prevail.

It's not because I love the way formats text, or love putting author names and dates first; to the contrary. No, my reformatting is done because bare URLs are of no help when links rot, only correct citation titles will help in recovery, and author names and dates, and correct publisher name helps, too.

What?

That's right, I said it. Wikipedia's policy is that citations - any citations, even bare urls - are needed to support claims, but as an experienced pessimist, I'm saying that's not good enough. My sad purpose for editing citations is to make them more robust for the long haul, in the face of a continuously rotting, decaying World Wide Web information infrastructure.

Bare URLs
Bare URLs need true titles associated with them to help repair link rot when it inevitably happens. Examples of links that rot: Any Yahoo-hosted or Google-hosted News article, especially AP articles.

URLs with true titles also help locate alternate versions of articles, some behind paywalls, some archived, some free. Examples: Article about repair of boardwalks vs "Boardwalk repairs slated for March"

URLs don't always match up with a publisher name, and those urls can change, so the actual name of the publisher becomes important.

Date
Date information is useful to determine provenance of a source. As a news article propogates, successive publishers frequently shorten wire stories to fit their format. The earliest published date is usually the most complete. If one is lucky, a publication will expand a wire story with additional local reportage, making for a richer, and frequently more accurate source.

I've tracked down a number of dead links using the provided date information, so that's needed, too.

Author
For multiple referencing (ref name=), the author last name + year is used in nearly all academic and scientific, so might as well put the author in. I don't like the way all the templates force authorname to be displayed first - title first is a valid citation format, and is more appropriate for some articles.

RollingStone.com's article search is busted. Only searching by author name will give you the article you need: title search doesn't work. This is true on more websites than I'm comfortable admitting.

So author name isn't for vanity at all - it can be critically important. If you buy my argument that citation robustness for the web is important at all.

Templates
Templates, once mastered, are the easiest to use, because they allow entering citation information in any order without fussing about formatting. They always produce correct punctuation per their citation style - this addresses the most annoying part of making citations look consistent on a page. If you're on a medical article, cite journal will save your ass.

Two columns? WTF?
As an article develops and approaches Good Article and hopefully Featured Article status, a sweep through all the citations with a template will get them looking great, and setting will neaten all the varying length citations, and probably significantly shorten the height of the References section on the page.

Future
I live in hope that someday cite web and other templates will allow a titles first layout option.