Template talk:Citation Style documentation/author

list of params from 1 to 9

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

As it is now, we have:

Aliases: authorlink, authorlink1, author-link, author1-link; authorlink2, author2-link; ... authorlink9, author9-link.

Would it be clearer with one more in the series:

Aliases: authorlink, authorlink1, author-link, author1-link; authorlink2, author2-link; authorlink3, author3-link; ... authorlink9, author9-link?

What about a different format, like this:

Aliases: authorlink, authorlink1, author-link, author1-link; authorlink[n], author[n]-link (where [n] is 1 through 9)?

What about trying this vertically:

Aliases:

authorlink, authorlink1, author-link, author1-link;

authorlink2, author2-link;

...

authorlink9, author9-link

Any other ideas? Coastside (talk) 20:13, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Help talk:Citation Style 1#Aliases. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 21:46, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I understand that discussion, but I don't see why you are linking to it here. The question is how to handle aliasing of authorlink paramaters in this sub template. Are you saying that discussion answers the question? If so, I'm confused, because it shows the way this was done when I originally added the authorlink parameters to this sub template on July 14 (they weren't documented prior to that). So it seems we've come round in a circle.Coastside (talk) 23:13, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thought you might want to participate in that discussion.

This part does not make sense to me:

authorlink2, author2-link; ... authorlink9, author9-link

The semicolon separates a series, the ellipsis indicates an omission. I am going to make one more stab at this, then I have other things to do. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 12:21, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The semicolon doesn't separate a series. It separates elements in a series. Everything within a set of semicolons is an alias of the same thing. In the above, authorlink2 and author2-link are aliases, which is why they are not separated by semicolons. The semicolon sets off the next group of aliases. The ellipses does represent an omission. The sequence [2] throuh [8] is omitted for brevity.Coastside (talk) 21:09, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

See WP:ELLIPSIS. You are using it to indicate a range; if these were pure numbers, then we would use an en dash per WP:DASH. They aren't numbers, thus through is more appropriate. The semicolon is now moot. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:16, 17 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think this approach works well. Nice job. Still one more problem, though. In the line that describes usage for last, you list aliases: last, author, authors, last1, author1. In the line that describes usage for first, there is no list of aliases. Shouldn't this include something that says aliases: first, first1? Coastside (talk) 00:02, 18 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 00:35, 18 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm happy with the result. Very clear.Coastside (talk) 09:35, 18 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Honorifics and suffixes

I was taught that citations should follow the form of the person's name, only inverted, with a comma, followed by a space, going where the space between the first and last names fell. Thus "Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.", would become "King, Jr., Rev. Martin Luther"; however, the style manuals I've perused specifically state not to use honorifics unless they're needed to identify the person, so this would become "King, Jr., Martin Luther". In the case of Bill Graham, the rock promoter, versus Billy Graham, the minister, it might be appropriate to cite the latter as "Graham, Rev. Billy", but even that is not strictly necessary because of the difference in the first names they used.

What I'm proposing is that the usage documentation be modified to instruct editors to include any necessary suffixes (Jr., Sr., etc.) in the |last= field, and any necessary honorifics, such as "Rev.", in the |first= field; but titles such as "Dr." and other honorifics should be omitted. If it is important, for reasons of distinguishing an author, to include a title, it should be done in the formal style: "Welby, M.D., Marcus", rather than "Welby, Dr. Marcus", and certainly "Hill, Robert, Ph.D.", rather than "Dr. Robert Hill". Additionally, omitting unnecessary prefixes and suffixes surely must help when COinS metadata is extracted?

Also, do we need to include the case of an author that is known by a titled position, rather than a name, e.g., "Queen Elizabeth II"?

I apologize if this has been discussed before; I was away from Wikipedia for some time and missed a lot of conversations about stuff like this. Thanks!—D'Ranged 1 ^VTalk 01:11, 25 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Where it is impractical to rearrange a name into a last/first pair, the |author= parameter (and its numbered siblings) may be used. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:59, 25 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Redrose64 I was perhaps too verbose; I object to instructing editors to put unnecessary titles in any field at all. If required, I think the documentation should instruct editors to put courtesy titles such as "Rev." in |first= and suffixes in |last=. Your comment didn't address the issues I was trying to raise; however, your comment would make an excellent addition to the documentation, just as you have written it. Thanks.—D'Ranged 1 ^VTalk 00:46, 26 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What is an example of "Where it is impractical to rearrange a name into a last/first pair"? And how can we encapsulate such examples into an exception or otherwise specific instruction? When it comes to things like "Jr[.]" and "III", these go at the end of |first= since they are not part of the surname and putting them in |last= will both pollute the surname data and mess with by-surname sorting. There is nothing complicated or confusing about |last=Chen|first=Jaime C. Jr. We're doing this thousands and thousands of times (though, yes, there still mangled instances like |last=Chen Jr.|first=Jaime C. or |author=Chen, Jr., Jaime C. or |author=Chen, Jaime C., Jr. to still clean up). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:14, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And (to better address the OP) Wikipedia doesn't use "Dr.", "PhD", etc. – in running prose or in citations. Doing so in citations would be insanely cumbersome (not to mention it isn't expected in any major citation style), since for many topics in academia and the sciences virtually every author would have one or more such glommed-on titles before and/or after their names. It would probably also lead to a bunch of confusion and WP:OR, with people doing their own research to try to figure out what kind of degree someone has and whatnot, then whether it applied at the time of the work's publication, and so forth. What a mess. Nor do we use ecclesiastical honorifics like "Rev.", or role-based ones like "Rt. Hon." or "Esq.", or nobility ones like "B[ar]t." and "Duchess". We have no reason to do "King James I" instead of just "James I". For guideline material, see MOS:PEOPLETITLES and its subsections on professional, honorific, and other titles, both prefixed and postfixed. There seems to be something vaguely approaching a consensus that "Sir/Dame [Firstname]" is okay, but it is still usually omitted in citations, and I've seen disputes arise when it comes to sticking such a title onto a name when the publication pre-dated the honour, so it's just best avoided. It simply doesn't help the reader identify the source in any way, and that is the purpose of all the data in the citation to begin with. If you have the book title The Tartans of the Clans and Families of Scotland, the edition information "7th" and/or publication date "1964", and author name "Thomas Innes of Learney" (which should be coded |last=Innes of Learney|first=Thomas since "of Learney" is properly part of the surname in such a case, and should just be omitted in cases where it is not), then you have no use at all for "Sir" stuck onto "Thomas" in tracking this source down, and he was not in fact Sir Thomas when the book was first published in 1938, so that would just be ripe for unproductive dispute. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:35, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Abuse of the "last"/"author" parameter for last-first name pairs

|last= and its alias |author= are not for full lastname-firstname[s] sets. They are the last name (surname, family name), or can be used for an organizational editor (e.g. a committee), or a mononymic author (like Madonna or James I). Putting full "First Last" or "Last, First" human name sets in there is directly polluting (blatantly lying about) the nature of the data in the parameter, and undermines the whole point of providing COinS metadata in the first place. (In particular, we are emitting rft.aulast metadata for this parameter, which claims that the data in the parameter is the author's last name. When the author only has one name, being mononymic or an organizational entity, this is not misleading, but when it's somethinge like "Chen, Jaime C." it is a patent falsehood, for no defensible reason, and it harms WP:REUSE of our material as well as parsing, e.g. by bibliographic software, by our more technically/academically inclined readers.)

What we have now in Template:Citation Style documentation/author is:

author: this parameter is used to hold the complete name of a single author (first and last) or to hold the name of a corporate author. This parameter should never hold the names of more than one author.

I sensibly changed this to:

author: this parameter is used to hold the complete name of an organizational author (e.g. a committee). This parameter should never hold the names of more than one author. Use to hold first and last names of an individual author is deprecated.

But I got reverted by Nikkimaria. (Reglardless of the rest of this discussion, "corporate" should be changed, since this doesn't have anything to do with corporations in particular, and people keep mistaking this for an instruction to repeat the |publisher= as the |author=, or even put the company name in |author= instead of in |publisher=, both of which practices are obviously incorrect; I've had a to fix about a dozen instances of this stuff today alone).

We also relatedly have:

authors: Free-form list of author names; use of this parameter is discouraged because it does not contribute to a citation's metadata; not an alias of last.

Trappist the monk changed this to:

authors: deprecated ~~Free-form list of author names; use of this parameter is discouraged because it does not contribute to a citation's metadata; not an alias of last.~~

but was again reverted by Nikkimaria.

Arguably it should have been:

authors: deprecated ~~Free-form list of author names~~; use of this parameter is discouraged because it does not contribute to a citation's metadata; not an alias of last.

since that provides one of the deprecation reasons, and the closing statement remains correct.

I think both of these changes should be put back in, because they actually reflect best practices, both in theory and in action. The parameters is this template are for rather specialized/specific purposes, and abusing them (out of, frankly, laziness about using multiple parameters properly) does harm to the data they emit, makes for confusing markup for editors, does nothing whatsoever to help readers, and is simply not how these templates are in practice used by the vast majority of our editors. For over a decade, I have been correcting such misuses of these template parameters (especiall |last= and |author= being abused for full human names; |authors= is rare). I've done this many thousands of instances (mostly very old ones dating from before the templates were so well-developed, and in some cases injected by tools that have since been re-coded to do better markup, though there is a small handful of editors who manually keep abusing the template parameters out of bad habit), and I've never been reverted on one these corrections, ever, even once. It's time that the documentation made better sense, and stopped including misguiding wording that results in a massive waste of editorial cleanup time. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:14, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I have faith that this can be accomplished, since we've made substantial progress already on the confusion between |publisher= and |work= (or its aliases like |website=, |newspaper=, |magazine=, etc.). Mike Novikoff and I tried to resolve that issue back in May of last year only to be reverted by Nikkimaria again, but the wording of the |publisher= entry at Template:Citation Style documentation/publisher today now does in fact address the issue very clearly, and I don't see anything at entries like |website= in Template:Citation Style documentation/web, or |work= at Template:Citation Style documentation/work, that any longer work against this clarity. If we can fix that problem, we can fix this one, too.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:14, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that nobody watches this page. The central discussion page for CS1 issues is Help Talk:CS1. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:21, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]