CZ Talk:Bibliography

Hoping Richard Jensen might help us out here. --Larry Sanger 07:31, 19 July 2007 (CDT)

Why no popular and historical sources?

This page contains two recommendations that I have my doubts about. Firstly, it says "Popular sources are usually not included unless they are influential in their own right, or better sources are lacking." What's the reason behind this? It does seem to be in contradiction with "The bibliography is most useful […] for preparing a written report like a college term paper or report for a high school AP course" (by the way, I've no idea what AP means; an American term I guess). Non-popular sources on things like quantum mechanics will be hard to understand for high school or college students.

Secondly, it says "Outdated or discredited sources should be avoided". However, I think that we should explicitly allow historical sources. For instance, I think the bibliography for evolution should contain Darwin's The Origin of Species, even though it is outdated (I haven't actually read the book, but I'm pretty sure it's outdated). -- Jitse Niesen 07:49, 2 September 2007 (CDT)

I agree there is a value to popular sources in very technical subjects like physics. Darwin is a major primary source in the history of science but he would not be recommended for an article on (current) biology (only on the history of biology). Ditto Newton and Copernicus. Richard Jensen 12:54, 2 September 2007 (CDT)

Further reading mandatory?

I'd like to suggest that a 'Further Reading' section be mandatory in all articles (wherever possible) to guide readers who want more information than is in the article.

Annotated lists are better than nothing, it's true, but at the same time, the person writing the article probably is familiar with the literature on the subject, and knows which works are i) most suitable for beginners, and ii) are highest in quality (readability, up-to-date, etc), and I think we'd be remiss in not passing along this knowledge to our readers. J. Noel Chiappa 11:42, 25 February 2008 (CST)

Make a subpage?

For those who missed it, Larry suggested "move all subpage policy pages like this to subpages of CZ:Subpages--does that make sense?" (And yes, I saw the ":-)"!) I thought about it for a while, and I'm not sure it really makes much difference. As long as "Search" can find it, I expect that's what's most important. Oh, BTW by the way, one reason to not make it a subpage is that if it's a page which one is likely to want to refer to from other CZ: pages, then it's probably easier to remember/find CZ:Bibliography than CZ:Subpages/Bibliography. Although I guess the former could redirect to the latter. J. Noel Chiappa 14:12, 25 March 2008 (CDT)

I think one thing that would help is to clearly state at the top of each page that these deal with subpages. There is nothing on these pages referencing subpages except for a link at the bottom. We recently had someone show up to comment on the proposed CZ:Recipes page and they didn't realize we were talking about subpages, so perhaps clarifying that would help. --Todd Coles 14:38, 25 March 2008 (CDT)

Annotations

Could someone please direct me to an example Bibliography subpage which is annotated so that I might have a model to follow. Should the notes be in tables? What sort of info is to be included? How much detail? James F. Perry 16:09, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

I think it's fair to say that this is still up in the air. I'd say go ahead and do what you think is appropriate. Maybe others here can point to particularly good examples/models that already exist? Chris Day 16:20, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

I was going to point you at Naval guns and gunnery/Bibliography, which, while not perfect, was at least a start, but I see that for some idiosyncratic reason, the careful separate into books/papers/etc has been removed. You can see a version with that organization here. Ditto this one. I can see we need more discussion on exactly how bibliographies are to be organized, sigh. J. Noel Chiappa 16:41, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

Okay, I just put something up on the biblio page of the Amish article. I am dissatisfied with the formatting (I think it is a bit ugly and the actual book author and title don't seem to stand out well enough). And I'm not sure the notes I wrote are really that informative, but I'll keep experimenting. James F. Perry 16:24, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

It looks like a good start to me. Let me know if you need a second opinion or help as things progress. Chris Day 16:26, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

I agree. There are some duplicate entries, and there's no common format for entries (something else we don't have good guidelines on yet - I guess we're supposed to be using CMS?), but the basic concept seems good to me. J. Noel Chiappa 16:45, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

FYI, i put in those duplicates as an example of a different style that might make the titles stand out from the annotation. Probably should have done that on the talk page. This seems ripe for a biblio citation template so that when styles get changed we can keep every biblograohy subpage in-sync. Chris Day 16:48, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

Yeah, I just figured that out. Definitely agree about the template, for a common look - I think we have {{citation}} already, maybe we should have a simpler one that's easier to use? I don't like the small font, though - when you eyes get as bad as mine (or Milton's, which seem to be even worse :-), you'll appreciate why! :-) I use a very noticeable and prominent visual marker (" - ") to separate the listing and annotation; that, and the use of a list, seems to be fine. J. Noel Chiappa 17:17, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

should bibliographies be divided into books/articles etc? Well that made sense in the old days, when you went to different parts of the library to find items. (The articles were in a basement for example), but in the online world it dies not help any, and it separates authors' books from their articles, which is bad. (ie If Jones has both a book and article on the same subject, you migh start with the article.) Richard Jensen 17:20, 19 May 2008 (CDT)

Annotation mechanics

I have started to play around with bibliographic formatting (see here) in an attempt to facilitate and standardize annotations and to evaluate the costs and benefits of and technical obstacles to a separate namespace for references in which the page names would contain DOI, ISBN or other URI stuff that makes them unique for a given bibliographic item. I am really only at the beginning here and plan to expand this testing over time. However, I already came across the following technical issues:

1. For a start, I thought of human-readable shorthands (e.g. Ref:Vallender2008gbh; currently situated at CZ:Ref:Vallender2008gbh) and wished to allow for optional inclusion of annotations like this one on bibliography subpages (as done on Neuroimaging/Bibliography). This created the following subproblems:
   • The annotations currently live at a subpage of the DOI-based page (see here) but I did not see how to address them via the shorthand without creating a subpage of the latter that points to the former (see here).
   • In general, I think it would be handy to have a system that can keep track of comments in a way similar to what {{subpages}} does for CZ:Subpages: Detecting new annotations or comments (or possibly even quotes and other stuff if appropriately formatted) and automatically list the available options for simple inclusion. I did this with three highly redundant lines but am sure there would be template-based ways to make this more efficient, though I am not aware of any option that would allow for iteration in templates or any other means of dealing with a possibly unlimited (or should it be limited?) number of such optional comments (i.e. arguments for the template)
2. I am stuck on a sideline with the question of how to replace the command <ref name=Lorenz1963dnf>{{:CZ:Ref:Lorenz1963dnf}}</ref> in Meteorology by a template that avoids having to type the reference shorthand twice. I tried {{Reftst}} with {{Reftst|abbrev=Lorenz1963dnf}} but it did not work in its current version. I assume this is easy to fix, and if any of you knows how, please do it or let me know otherwise.
3. The Lorenz reference is also relevant to the naming of such reference pages, since the DOI naming conventions do seem to allow for "<" and ">", while wikimedia markup does not accept this for page names (at least with the current settings in CZ namespace). Is there a way around this?
4. I think it would be nice to have something like {{reflist}} that collects all the reftst-formatted references and (optionally?) puts them on the bibliography subpage rather than the article page itself. No idea, though, how to implement that.

--Daniel Mietchen 20:39, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I've taken this discussion to the technical forum. --Daniel Mietchen 09:19, 11 December 2008 (UTC)