User:Rich Farmbrough/temp67

Use of terms
Date is a general term that includes anything as or more coarsely grained than a day. Examples: And do forth up to dating fossils from an era.
 * What is the date? 12th January 2011
 * What is the date of that magazine? June 2006
 * What date was 1984 published? 1948
 * What date would you give that furniture? Early 1870s

Current fields
The template currently supports date month and year.

These fields (as a group) fulfil two purposes, providing a publication date, and assisting in creating a Harvard reference

Publication date
The date field is used if there is one, failing that year + month, failing that year.

Harvard ref
Year is never needed for a Harvard ref, in the sense that there is a ref field and the only time the Harvard referencing cannot use the date field is when there are two works by the same name in the same year: in this case they are "Good 2006a" and "Good 2006b" (or "Good 2006" and "Good 2006a", whatever) - and in this case the "ref" field can be used (ref=Good 2006b instead of ref=harv).

Drawbacks

 * Duplication of data is not good
 * Extra blank fields get propagated by cut and paste
 * Having a year field set to "2006b" seems like a bad thing.
 * Users can fill in the year field when they have the full date and not make information available
 * Users can duplicate information in the 3 fields
 * Poeple who cut and paste the templates may update the date field and leave old values in the others or vice versa.

Advantages

 * Generates the Harvard ref tag from the name of the author and the non-year (2006b)

Proposal

 * to be kept only when it is Harvard extended, or when there is a date field but it is legitimately badly formed (e.g. winter 2006). Possibly rename field
 * Cases where Harvard extension is used but not needed should be cleaned up separately. E.G. when there is Good2006a and no other Good2006 references. Also gaps in lettering sequence.
 * to be merged into the field and deprecated
 * to be cleaned up where needed (e.g. 19-12-1968 etc.)

Advantages

 * Less fields
 * Less risk of inconsistency
 * None of the disadvantages of the above

Disadvantages

 * Requires a little work to bring existing articles in line.