Conservapedia talk:Footnotes - technical help

Would you like me to fill in the technical how-to, Conservative? --Sid 3050 17:24, 31 March 2007 (EDT)

Footnote style

Should there maybe be a consistent style to the footnotes? MLA? Myk 00:29, 1 April 2007 (EDT)

Yes, some guidelines on the format of footnotes would be appreciated. I've changed a number that were often straight links to include the name of the article, the author, etc., but I'm not certain that I've done it in quite the right way. What would be best is some templates for footnotes, along the line of {{WebQuote||link|article name|author}}. There would probably need to be a number of different ones; a quote from a book that is not on-line would not have the link, for example. And having the templates would reduce or eliminate the need to detail the format. Philip J. Rayment 00:37, 1 April 2007 (EDT)

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We still have no proper guide to the style of footnotes. Attempts to create guides have been started here by All Fish Welcome and here by HeartOfGold, but neither were completed, and the authors are not very active and longer with Conservapedia respectively.

They both made similar proposals, one aspect being that there should be both a bibliography or sources section, and a references or footnotes section. The latter would contain not only explanatory footnotes, but also references to publications included in the bibliography section. An example of this would look like the following:

Sources

• Smith, J., Smith's book, ABC Publishing Co., 1999.

Notes

1. Smith, 1999, p.123.

I have tried using this basic style in a number of cases. It is more work initially, but it is less work if a given source is being cited a number of times.

HeartOfGold copied a couple of templates from Wikipedia for use with referencing. I had a number of minor concerns with the templates, including there being so many options that it was confusing. Another problem is that the templates, or even the proposed style for that matter, doesn't really seem to cater for all cases.

Information in references can include the following:

• Author(s), or other role (translator, editor, etc.)
• Title of article (in periodical or on web-site)
• Title of publication (book or periodical)
• Title of chapter of book
• Date of publication (sometimes only the year)
• Publisher
• Publisher location
• Edition
• Page number or numbers
• Web link to on-line content of article, chapter, or book
• Web link to publication, but not to the content
• Internal link to author
• Internal link to publication
• ISBN

One problem is when almost none of this information is available. On-line source, in particular, often have no author, no date of publication, and sometimes no title!

I would prefer that we develop our own citation style to cater for all the citations we might want to use (which could be almost any combination of those listed above, except where they are obviously mutually exclusive), but at the same time I don't want to do anything too different to citation styles used in the wider world.

One question I have is how the author's name should be shown. Putting the surname first, then the Christian name is a very common way of doing it, and helps with putting a Bibliography in alphabetical order. But if we want to Wiki-link the author, we have to have a piped Wiki-link (e.g. [[John Smith|Smith, John]]. Putting the Christian name first avoids piped links, is also used in the wider world, and doesn't actually prevent putting publications in alphabetical order by author, but does make them a little harder to find. (But with a suitable template, it probably wouldn't matter either way.)

What do others think on all this?

Philip J. Rayment 07:46, 9 July 2007 (EDT)