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More on style
I think I'm losing the thread of what I'm saying so will wit for other's comments! [[User:Sarahb|Sarah]] 12:55, 16 November 2009 (PST)
:Wow! I knew there had to be one, but ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28titles%29 WP: MOS Titles]) leads into the whole Wikipedia Manual of Style and it just sucks you in!
:Firstly I apologise about altering "status quo ante" to ''status quo ante bellum''. The latter is the original source of the former and in the context it just struck me as appropriate to use. I italicised because the full phrase is in Latin and such is the convention - in fact, since the FibiWiki will be read by a significant number of readers for whom English is not their first language, this is a very helpful convention to observe fully - more so than Wikipedia suggests. If we ever get around to writing our own manual of style, we need to remember this.
:Secondly, I am not sure that Wikipedia is itself consistent (but I haven't read enough of its MOS so must be careful). When I got going seriously on family history (about 1997), I realised that I needed to learn about how to cite sources and create bibliographies. To cut a long journey short, I ended up with the work of an American genealogist, Elizabeth Shown Mills, the then editor of the ''NGS Journal'', who clearly laid out a system that was based on the ''Chicago Manual of Style'' but adapted to meet the needs of genealogists and family historians who draw information largely from unpublished or private papers and sources.
:Wikipedia's own MOS seems to draw on the Chicago MOS which is helpful. When citing a work, the convention is: Author, ''Title'' (publishing history), text reference. With an encyclopedia, the convention is: (Author if known,) "Entry", ''Title'' (publishing history), ref. So a typcal citation looks like: "East Indian Railway", ''Encylopedia Indiana'', 12 Volumes (Maidenhead: Wilding Press, 2009), 5:10-15. (The very last bit is the specific volume plus pages - English, as opposed to American practice, still tends to spell it out i.e. "Vol 5, pp 10-15". Whoops! too much detail.)
:So for a reference or note to a Wikipedia article, I would use:
:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_Army "History of the British Army"], ''Wikipedia'' (accessed 17 November 2009). [The accessed date serves as the date the information was "published" to me.]
:and the reason I have drawn you down this route is that there is a fundamental difference between our FibiWiki and Wikipedia in that much of our material is going to be original research which is anathema to Wikipedia. So at some time, we are going to have to agree a citation style and police it. Unfortunately, the inbuilt referencing tools have not yet been implemented in our version of the wiki software and we must wait until they are. I continue to make noises in the right quarter (not Valmay, I hasten to add).
:I accept that citations are not the saem as external links but it does help to explain why my external links often look like:
:*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_Army "History of the British Army"], ''Wikipedia''.
:*Terry Case, [http://shankardubai.tripod.com/carman.htm "Hal Hughes' family page"], ''North Western Railway''.
:but I am inconsistent and I know I often am with that comma separator after the link symbol.
:So when I have that odd weekend, I will get stuck into the Wikipedia MOS!
:[[User:HughWilding|HughWilding]] 01:36, 17 November 2009 (PST)
