BattleTechWiki talk:Manual of Style/References

Unveiled

Okay, if I ever felt like I've put tons of effort into anything here, this ranks up in the top 5. The help sections get progressively detailed, assuming that Editors will choose to match the method that best fits their skills. And I love how Special:UserScore says I've only contributed 6 edits today, when I've easily saved 50x that number. --Revanche ^{(talk|contribs)} 03:54, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

References, Links and Bibliographies

I've been chatting with one of the new users here about the formatting of references because I'd noticed the sourcebook within reference tags appearing as a link. I was under the impression that making the sourcebook title within a reference was discouraged in favour of listing the various sourcebooks referenced as links within the Bibliography section of each article, but this help page doesn't say that - instead, it calls for sourcebook names within every reference to be a link. Is that still the current policy? If it is, then I've been getting it wrong for almost two years now. BrokenMnemonic (talk) 23:45, 9 May 2013 (PDT)

Saw that discussion. And I agree, the Help page is a bit outdated and doesn't seem to describe the most common procedure on BTW. To be honest, I never actually read it before. I think we should reword the Help page to reflect what we're actually doing: Put links into references only if the referenced source is not already covered in (linked from) a Bibiography or Sources section within the article.
There are cases where you need to reference a source that shouldn't appear in a Bibliography section for one reason or another (for example because it is only quoted on a tangential and has nothing to do with the article's subject, or because there is only a single reference and this wouldn't warrant a Bibliography section in the first place). In that case, putting the link into the reference proper is okay. At least that's how I'm going about it. Frabby (talk) 03:58, 10 May 2013 (PDT)

Indicating multiple pages per #Specific References

"FedCom Civil War, p. 104, pp. 120-121, p. 133"

The pp. should be for the entire group of pages - pp. 104, 120–121, 133, that same way it would be used for pp. 1, 5, 9, 13.

I didn't think I should edit this myself without checking here. Madness Divine (talk) 22:42, 27 April 2022 (EDT)

Nearly a month and no comment. I'm going to make to correction on the page. Madness Divine (talk) 02:07, 23 May 2022 (EDT)

Citation format

Currently the preferred format is product, page, description. This has a problem when pages are a list that includes a comma.

Somebody else was using product, page: description, which gets around the page list issue. I've been using it because it makes a lot more sense to me.

I'd like feedback on changing the page guidelines to recommend the second format. Madness Divine (talk) 02:07, 23 May 2022 (EDT)

Second detailed method

Just read through this help article about the second detailed method of references.

I don’t think this is explicitly stated, but I just wanted someone to confirm the following

It is best practice to refrain from using shorthand reference tags in an article before the reference tag is fully defined, correct?

I recently came across the kervil protectorate militia article that had reference tag definitions after the shorthand reference tags. It was a bear to find the reference tag definitions later on in the article. 75.23.228.139 06:01, 29 September 2022 (EDT)

Took me a bit to figure out what you meant; slow brain day. You mean like having a <ref name=Bob/> in the infobox but the full reference further down the page, correct?

Yes, it's bad practice, but a project I'll let somebody else take on. Madness Divine (talk) 11:50, 29 September 2022 (EDT)

Yes, that’s precisely what I meant. I was actually a bit shocked to find out that wikitags allowed shorthand ref tags to be used before the ref tag was fully defined...seems to encourage the equivalent of spaghetti coding.75.23.228.139 12:37, 29 September 2022 (EDT)

As Madness said, it is best practice to get the actual reference as high up in the article as possible (infobox is best of all), but for some strange reason has never specifically spelled out. As a secondary thought, looking through the article, I think we could quite comfortably remove most of it and simply have "second detailed method" as our standard method.--Dmon (talk) 13:58, 29 September 2022 (EDT)