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Latest comment: 3 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion
@Beevil: Concerning your edit with the edit summary "destructive edit that removes COinS metadata", you do realize that |vauthors= is parsed by {{cite journal}} to produce clean COinS metadata? Also Wikipedia is not a reliable source, and that includes citations. Why is citation COinS metadata important to begin with? Much more reliable to harvest identifiers like PMID and generate citations from scratch if needed. Why is Wikipedia trying to clone PubMed? This make no sense. Boghog (talk) 21:51, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Beevil: While reverting my edit, you have also managed to remove data. For example, with PMID27094616, I added the full author list which is now removed. Also with PMID22052063 and PMID23389427 where only first initial were provided. Is it really necessary to use verbose |firstn=|lastn= parameters when exactly the same COinS metadata is much more efficiently stored by |vauthors=? Boghog (talk) 22:03, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Boghog:It was my understanding that it wasn't generated based on the template documentation, apologies if I've missed or misread it. I'm not sure what wikipedia being a reliable source or not has to do with this, since we're talking about references to reliable sources in articles. I'm also not sure there's any point debating the merits of COinS metadata here. As I say if it's maintained with vauthors then fair enough, but I don't see how essentially a free text field is better than a properly structured citation, especially when the same cosmetic effect can be achieved without such sweeping edits. Is there any benefit to changing how authors are entered other than visual preference? I have re-added the full authors to PMID27094616. Beevil (talk) 22:17, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
The issue is more than cosmetics. The advantage of using |vauthors= is that the raw wiki text is less cluttered and therefore easier to edit. The argument for COinS metadata is that the citation can be reused, presumably for adding the same citation other articles. But Wikipedia articles, including imbedded citations can be corrupted. It is more reliable to harvest identifiers like PMID and use the numerous citation generation tools to regenerate the citation from scratch. Boghog (talk) 22:28, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
I'm also not sure there's any point debating the merits of COinS metadata here I am merely responding to your justification for reverting my edit. Boghog (talk) 22:43, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Beevil:but I don't see how essentially a free text field is better than a properly structured citation Quite to the contrary, |firstn= is a free text field, |vauthors= is not. |vauthors= is an entirely acceptable component of a properly structured citation and is definitely not a free text field. First of all, it is comma limited, and therefore can easily be parsed by cite templates. Second, it is error checked, and in fact is much more rigorous in what it will accept compared to the |firstn= parameter, |firstn= will accept any characters including complete @#$%^& gibberish. |vauthors= when presented with the same gibberish will generate an error message. Boghog (talk) 23:49, 27 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
