User talk:Cplot/CitationProposal

Comments

One other thing I forgot to mention is the distinction between freeflow and structured source dats. BIBTeX, for example is a structure bibliographic reference. The one I use above for Ptolemy's The Almagest is unstructured or freeflow. I didn't think to raise this at first because, I think the software enhancements I propose would abstract editors and readers alike from worrying about this distinction (except in the case of manually entered sources). Also the problems I outline above and the distinction between bookcite and Cite.php are somewhat independent of this issue. I would welcome other views on this however. Any other comments? --Cplot 21:35, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

One obvious one: actually applying "should mainly encourage both parenthetical notes and parenthetical citations unless they become too unwieldy" will be make most newly promoted FAs utterly unreadable. We've reached a point where, on average, every other sentence will be cited, often from a number of sources; putting all of this information directly into the text will render it unreasonably convoluted for anyone not given to reading scientific proceedings. This is particularly true in cases where existing footnotes contain both source information and further commentary; ignoring the CMS and using both styles together may be acceptable in theory, but it really does tend to produce more convoluted text.

(I question the relevance of making this proposal here, incidentally. This is a style guide for footnotes, and it would be quite inappropriate for it to open by recommending a different format entirely.)

In general, though, I think that the most important thing is to strenuously discourage converting from Harvard to footnotes, and vice versa, without the approval of an article's regular editors. Any style guide that encourages such changes—even implicitly—will only produce massive edit-warring (which will disproportionately affect our better articles, since those tend to be the ones with heavier citation). Kirill Lokshin 21:57, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: While restraint of the editors can be hoped for in created new texts (as on Wikipedia), it cannot be counted on in reproducing extant texts (as on Wikisource), where footnotes to footnotes are simply reality. Since all the wikimedia projects run on the same software, hopefully note support will become as general as possible. Shimmin 21:57, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]