Talk:Davington Light Railway

User:Gwernol reverted some reference formating I edited and I would invite discussion.

The page used a reference template (cite-refs) to construct Harvard referencing but it does not generate a full reference as per Wikipedia:Cite_sources#Harvard_referencing.

In the case of the Oakwood Press publication the series type and series number (in this case Locomotion Papers No. 40). Although (Volume=40) appears in the template, it does not make it to the final result. In addition, volume 40 is not sufficient as there is also an X40 and an OL40 as examples. Is this citation template flexible enough to generate full references?

Also to improve the readability of ISBNs they should be hyphenated. I have seen a number of hyphenation schemes on Wikipedia including the ISBN page itself! A format of X-XXXXX-XXX-X appears to be common and one formated by User:SmackBot.

I removed the '(references /)' tag from references section as it appeared to be redundant for the article as it stands. Maybe it was 'future-proofing'? It was also removed in an attempt to correct the mis-formating (looked like an internal rendering error) on the ==see also== title. Check my first edit. Maybe it is just a IE 6 or 7 issue.

A final carriage return (can we still use this term?) improved the readibility of the external link by giving a bit of space above the stub tag.

Positive comments from a fellow ferroequinologist Hutch 08:40, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Hutch. Yes I reverted some of your changes. In general use of the various {{cite}} formats is preferred to manually formatting references, even if they are not inline references. You are right that we should specify the Oakwood book as part of the Locomotion Paper series, I have updated the cite to include that.

In general you should leave the <references /> in place. It makes no impact on what is rendered in the article and means that inline citations are properly rendered if added to the article. I hope to have time to expand the article to the point where inline citations are required. As you say, this is a measure of "future proofing".

I am not sure what you mean about the misformatting of the "See also" section. First that's not impacted by the presence or absence of the <references /> tag. Second your edit indented the "See also" header, which Wikipedia interprets to mean "place this seciton in a separate box and don't format it". This results in a fairly ugly effect; see the version produced by your edit: [1].

Thanks, Gwernol 13:32, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Gwernol. Thanks for that. Manually generated references, Harvard style, are second nature due to my background and I have seen from looking around Wikipedia that citation templates do generate a certain degree of correspondence within the editing fraternity. I have no desire to add to this controversy, so unless they are blatantly in error I will, from here on, conform to the template used by the original editor for consistency.

I can see now why a rogue space (notwithstanding numerous previews) caused the formatting to go astray. Thanks for that, and I know that our common interests will see us both adding to similar pages in this encyclopedia.

Cheers, Hutch 19:34, 12 December 2006 (UTC)