Three
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Please discuss, comment and criticise politely.
Circle of Confusion
editWhile I'm not a fan of the reference style in that article, Jeff is right that you shouldn't just change it. It presently has a clear separation between references and other kinds of notes, and it's not appropriate to merge those. Dicklyon (talk) 15:20, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Response
editFirstly, thank you for taking the time to explain your reasoning.
I agree that arbitrary changes are useless shed painting, however, I disagree that this was an arbitrary change. I changed it because:
- The citation style used confuses internal links with links to notes at the bottom of the page
- The notes and references were already mixed e.g. comment about Kodak
Perhaps my edit wasn't well thought out and should have tried to separate notes from references, however, it did make worthwhile changes to the document. A complete revision of my edit does not lead to a net improvement to the document.
I have now reached my apathy limit as far as this is concerned, and I will leave the page in its confusing state. Three (talk) 16:09, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
- The WP:MOS accepts either endnote or parenthetical (in this case, author-date) referencing, and does not express a preference for either. Although some publications combine references and substantive notes, it is far from decided that it must be that way, and WP provides several means of keeping them separate. One approach is using author-date style for citations so it's obvious which are the references and which are the notes; this, in fact is the approach recommended by The Chicago Manual of Style (“CMS”; 15th ed, 16.63 and 16.64) when a work includes susbstantive notes. The author-date system is arguably the most common approach in the sciences, including photographic science (see, for example, Sidney Ray's Applied Photographic Optics, 3rd ed.).
- It's possible to avoid the author-date system by using the group attribute in references, giving two independent series of notes, for example[1] and[Note 1].
- Notes
- ^ This is a note.
- References
- ^ This is a reference.
- I find this far more confusing than the author-date system, but that may simply be personal preference.
- I don't understand how the author-date system “confuses internal links with links to notes at the bottom of the page”. I'm also not sure what was meant by the “comment about Kodak”, but if the reference was to “See Eastman Kodak Company”, that format again is from CMS 17.47, and is used when an abbreviated form of the full reference name is used in the text. I certainly don't suggest that CMS is the last word on the subject, and neither does the WP:MOS; CMS is nonetheless widely used (at least in the USA) and is one of the first general style guides recommended in the MOS.
- I don't claim that the current approach is the only reasonable one, but simply wish to demonstrate that it's far from capricious.
- I have no problem with indicating variables with <var> tags (I've done it for nearly everything I've written); there simply is no easy way to revert only part of an edit. But here again, WP accepts either style; I've made several edits to this article, and left the simple italic tagging in deference to the prevailing style. JeffConrad (talk)