User talk:TheTechnician27/Archives/2018/July

Way to go!
Hi. I just saw at Global warming. That article (like so many others) is in such bad shape in respect of citation that I can hardly stand to touch it. So I am impresesed as well as pleased by both how much work you have done, and that you seem to have good sense about it. Thank you. Considering you are doing so much, I would like to offer some suggestions, largely the fruits of my experience, which you might find helpful. Please excuse me if I get a bit didactic; at the rate you're going it seems best to just throw out a lot of stuff, and then answer any questions you have.

By now you have probably heard of WP:CITEVAR (right?). Basically, citation is, and always has been, a very sensitive, even emotional, topic at Wikipedia, with lots of battles. The basic idea of CITEVAR is that consistency of citation "style" with a given article is more important than what the "style" is, and that an existing style should not be changed without consensus to do so. But often there are big battles over what is within the scope of "style", and whether some changes are exempt from such changes. So far you seem to be running clear of such problems; let me know if you get any flashback.

With the foregoing in mind, I think you should consider putting non-templated citations into templates. In general, untemplated citations should be left that way only if an article's citations are predominately untemplated.

One of the things that really annoys me is when editors cram a bunch of editor names into an author field. That is just wrong, so I am particularly pleased that you have been splitting up all of those. (Likewise for any "coauthors=": that is actually deprecated.) "Author=" is for group or institutional authorship, where "last" and "first" are not applicable. (E.g.: "author=State of California", although usually more particular attribution is preferable.) Where a real person is involved "author=" should be changed to "last=" or "surname=".

A similar case is where an author's first and last names are crunched together. One of reasons for doing that is that in some cases it is difficult to discern just how much of an author's name is the surname by which an author is indexed; putting that into "last=" (or "surname=") clarifies that, and lets the software do some reasonable things. It looks like you have split up some of those (good); by all means catch as many as you can.

I see you have often added missing authors (most excellent!), but I would suggest they should be grouped together. (I.e., without non-author fields between them.)

Enough reviewing for now. I would be pleased to answer any questions. (Even more pleased if you wanted to take a couple more passes at the GW articles.) &diams; J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:03, 30 June 2018 (UTC)

Thank you! I'm really glad people seem to like it; I was worried the entire time it was going to be reverted almost immediately, especially since using the templates in visual editing messed up some of the indenting in the source page. I really wanted to convert those non-template citations, but I didn't want to overstep my bounds as I'd assumed I was already kind of pushing it; now that I know I wasn't, I may go back and fix that.

I'm familiar with variation in citations, and I do my best to avoid personal preference. Usually what I'll do is establish what the dominant method is and try to convert everything to that. The only two things I go out of my way to change are publication year to publication date (if one is listed) and author abbreviations to full names (again, if they're listed); these two, in my opinion, aren't really matters of style so much as deliberately leaving out relevant information about a citation.

There is one question I had: how does one go about adding suffixes to a name in a citation, e.g. Jr., Sr., III, etc.?

Also, yeah, it's kind of incredible what poor shape some (extremely well-written) articles are in. It's unfortunate that they're so often overlooked when there must be so many people who come to Wikipedia almost exclusively for the sources. Nonetheless, I'll keep on trying. Thanks for the positive feedback! TheTechnician27 (talk) 06:12, 1 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Simple: . "last=" (or "surname=") is the primary key by which authors are sorted and searched, the other name details go into "first=".


 * You were also collapsing templates from vertical layout (parameters on separate lines) to horizontal layout. Vertical (or mostly so) is definitely preferable where full citations are gathered in a separate section, and it would be unwise to collapse those. But most editors put their full citations in-line (in the article text), and there many editors prefer horizontal layout, supposedly because it is more compact. I am dubious myself, and just yesterday reformatted a pair of similar citations so I could better see what was there. So you might want back-off from collapsing citations. If someone really wants them horizontal they would have done it that way, and I think there is no great harm leaving them be.


 * I mention that because even though I generally prefer vertical format, I have exceptions. Especially: names. Whether one does first-last or last-first (the s/w doesn't care), I find that having both parts on the same line makes them easier to check, especially for the numbers. (Gotta watch out for a first4 running off with a last5, etc..)Some object to such pretty-printing ("the s/w doesn't care"), but my long experience in programming says that clarity and orderliness makes a HUGE difference in accuracy. For the same reason I usually put volume, issue, and pages on the same line, and usually just below the journal title. &diams; J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:56, 1 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Is there a way to keep it from becoming horizontal automatically? I like to edit in visual mode, and I find that the citations, for whatever reason, automatically revert to horizontal mode; I have no problem with vertical, and even largely agree with their use in large citations or consecutive strings of citations. TheTechnician27 (talk) 22:03, 1 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Automatically?? Oh, you're using VE. Crap. Many of us think that is one of the worst bits of work ever done on WP. Just for curiousity, try a trivial edit on a "Sources" section somewhere (e.g., Hilina slump) where the citation template parameters are formatted mostly vertical, and see if VE automatically reformats the citations. The crowd that designed VE had some quite dubious notions of what constituted a "good thing", and automatic reformatting (of various kinds) seems par for the course. Possibly there is some configuration parameter for that (default "on"!). If not, then all the more reason to proscribe VE.


 * As a programmer you likely understand (and if not – you should!) the difference between finicky and fussy. As a matter of finickyness I would point out that "large citations" is not a clear concept. We have full citations, specifically defined by most authorities as having the fullest useful bibliographical details of a source, and distinguished from shortened citations or short-cites. The latter, especially as implemented with harv templates, are so short that vertical format just seems bizarre. I am a bit fussy about concept precision because we have had so much difficulty arising from poor concepts. In this case the distinction between "full" and "short" citations is of type, whereas "large" suggests size. Whereupon someone "clarifies" that "large" means "more than 72 characters". On which basis someone else subsequently insists that " " is "large", and therefore a "full" citation, and another dozen hours is spent debating the matter. (Yup, it happens.) &diams; J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:53, 2 July 2018 (UTC)


 * And then someone adds an sfnref to ref to specify that it should match with one name alone, such that alone works...Face-smile.svg  — Paleo  Neonate  – 05:28, 15 July 2018 (UTC)