User:Brandingopportunity/User blog/Tips for being a Pathfinder Chronicler 3

Hi folks,

It's been a long time since I have written one of these, but I guess that's because I haven't felt a terribly pressing need to. All that is really required in order to be a good member of the Pathfinder Wiki community is a willingness to put some regular time into this ever-growing site, pay attention to the work of others and work in concert with them, and police oneself in terms of grammar, punctuation, and all the other small details.

Having said that, I have come across something which I thought I wanted to share. It revolves around the formatting of citations; I know, it's a spellbinding topic. In the past, I have often used the "ref name=" format (e.g. {{ref name="BP01"}}) for creating multiple citations to the same book. Although that saves a bit of time the next time you want to cite the same source, I have found that it gets you in trouble when you want to move text around in an article. A secondary citation to a source (e.g. {{ref name="BP01" /}}) that is moved before the reference that it refers to will not work, and you have to end up recreating the citation. I have found that it is easy enough just to leave them "name=" formatting off and make each citation a full citation. If I want to use the same citation again, I can simply cut and paste the text. That way if I have to move blocks of text around, I don't have to rewrite citations.

Of course, as with much of writing wiki entries, in terms of what I have just written YMMV.

My main thought on the issue is that short named references make for cleaner markup. Sometimes when I go to edit an article I get a little overwhelmed by all of the "stuff" associated with references. For me, it's a lot easier for my eyes and mind to digest <ref name="cs103" /> than <ref>{{Cite book/Campaign Setting|103}}</ref>. —Aeakett (talk) Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:36:52 +0000

Aw! We didn't mean to shut you down, our milage just varies :-( —Aeakett (talk) Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:34:02 +0000

My follow up question to your comment is: Is an article ever truly done, though? It seems there is always a chance that it will be updated. Since the code is never seen in the article, I don't think it matters much whether it is condensed or not. —Brandingopportunity (talk) Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:09:08 +0000

Well, then ignore everything I said above :( —Brandingopportunity (talk) Fri, 25 Dec 2009 11:42:12 +0000

question, if you use the full name and source information (as you would with the first citation of a source) on all citations of said source, does it condense them? or is it only the {ref name="THHE" /} If the first is true, it allows for movement as they would have the same name....Wouldn't help Aeakett feeling cluttered though —Cpt kirstov (talk) Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:58:22 +0000

But I was specifically asking about putting the name in each full citation.... see my edit to your first link... that way it works, and can be moved around without getting the references messed up —Cpt kirstov (talk) Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:37:41 +0000

As long as, once an article is done, the citations are condensed by using the ref name feature, I think that's an excellent suggestion. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:35:05 +0000

If it's not condensed, citations are duplicated in the references section and it can clutter that part of the page. Instead of six different citations citing CS pp. 42-45, you get a single line reference with six superscript numbers linking to the specific citations in an article. So even when an article isn't "finished," condensing citations is important. If it's clearly a WIP and you're doing a lot of work on it over a few days, then sure. But once you move on to another article and it's "done for now" then citations should be condensed. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:50:23 +0000

See examples of the above mentioned differences at User:Yoda8myhead/sandbox and User:Yoda8myhead/sandbox2. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:05:17 +0000

There are pywikipedia scripts that clean up markup, though I don't know the extent to which it handles this sort of thing. I would love a script that I could run on any page and have it automatically compress and consolidate the citations. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:32:07 +0000

See the examples I linked to above. In one case I wrote out the same citation several times and in the other I condensed them manually. Wikimedia software does not automatically know to combine like citations into a single line in the references section. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:09:40 +0000

That's true, but it does add to markup clutter, which is one reason to use abbreviated names instead of full citations. So this method is a partial solution, but I still don't think it's ideal. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:45:50 +0000