Now that I've read the reasoning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2006_July_...)...
Here's the deal. I created this ISBN template {{ISBN}} which does nothing very exciting. It simply substitutes the text "ISBN {{{1}}}". However, my reasoning for creating it seemed sound: to provide an abstraction layer so users don't have to learn the rather arbitrary syntax that Wikipedia uses to deal with ISBN codes. Instead, they can use the same syntax they use everywhere: {{template name|argument}}.
Is this a bad idea? Personally, I find the ISBN markup extremely arbitrary and maybe not that well thought out. We apparently only allow pure ISBN numbers, with no hyphens, spaces or slashes, although they are usually presented that way in other contexts. By wrappering this syntax in standard template syntax, we would clear the way for a future, more forgiving ISBN syntax to be implemented.
Similarly, although the ISBN syntax is "simple" it may not be "intuitive". What is the first reaction of people confronted with the problem of inserting an ISBN number likely to be? "How do I make this do that cool link thing?" What are they then most likely to try? {{ISBN|34895342985}} maybe?
The arguments for deletion were interesting: * How worse can we get? This perform exactly the same function as typing ISBN+space+number, except with more characters. Let's burninate it with fire.
In the same way that implementing getX() { return X; }} is a waste of space.
* Delete all text templates that take more characters to write than what they produce.
I guess they wouldn't like {{--}} either. :)
* Subst but keep It's the sort of thing we'd create a redirect for if it were an article, not a special piece of wikimarkup. It may be worth checking 'what links here' every so often so that it can be susbted and users who use it told the correct syntax.
The most enlightening - this person definitely thinks it's better that we "educate" people on the "correct syntax", rather than admitting our mistake at having a special syntax, and letting people not even have to think about the question of formatting ISBN numbers.
* Comment This template was added to Maelor Way recently. I added a notice to inform editors of the proper ISBN style.
Again - although the editors were using a template which took care of "the proper ISBN style" for them, we choose instead to take away their automatic transmission and tell them how to use a manual gearbox.
I'm just a bit dismayed by the kind of reasoning that goes on at some of these deletion debates, where instead of "is this harmful?" we have "is this needed?"
Comments very welcome, particularly if I'm completely misguided.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
Here's the deal. I created this ISBN template {{ISBN}} which does nothing very exciting. It simply substitutes the text "ISBN {{{1}}}". However, my reasoning for creating it seemed sound: to provide an abstraction layer so users don't have to learn the rather arbitrary syntax that Wikipedia uses to deal with ISBN codes. Instead, they can use the same syntax they use everywhere: {{template name|argument}}.
Sounds sensible to me. "Magic" syntax where seemingly normal-looking text gets transformed is evil, because it's unclear what's going on, and prone to breakage. MediaWiki took a great leap forward by moving from magical CamelCase links to [[marked-up links]], for example. Just about the only necessary evil I can think of is the auto-date-formatting; dates are too common to really be done any other way, although it too is slightly evil and sometimes kicks in or doesn't kick in in unexpected ways.
-Mark
On 8/4/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Sounds sensible to me. "Magic" syntax where seemingly normal-looking text gets transformed is evil, because it's unclear what's going on, and prone to breakage. MediaWiki took a great leap forward by moving from magical CamelCase links to [[marked-up links]], for example. Just about the only necessary evil I can think of is the auto-date-formatting; dates are too common to really be done any other way, although it too is slightly evil and sometimes kicks in or doesn't kick in in unexpected ways.
What about http://magic.formatting.com ? Is that a necessary evil? I suspect it's probably not that evil.
Which auto date formatting do you mean, btw? I see these constant references to it when people link stuff like [[August 8]], but we don't seem to have any settings that return a nice result like "8th of August", which is what my personal preference would be...
Using link syntax to induce special formatting is definitely not right.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
Which auto date formatting do you mean, btw? I see these constant references to it when people link stuff like [[August 8]], but we don't seem to have any settings that return a nice result like "8th of August", which is what my personal preference would be...
That's precisely what it's for, although ordinal dates aren't currently an option. Go to preferences->date&time. For year-less dates, it'll auto-convert between [[October 28]] and [[28 October]], and for year-havin' dates it'll auto-convert between any of these 5: [[October 28]], [[1940]] [[28 October]] [[1940]] [[1940]] [[October 28]] [[1940]]-[[10-28]] [[1940-10-28]]
The two most common seem to be the top two, with Americans preferring the first and many Europeans preferring the second. I suppose another format that was the same as the 2nd but with ordinals would please some folks as well, but perhaps it's somewhat harder to implement.
-Mark
On 8/4/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
That's precisely what it's for, although ordinal dates aren't currently an option. Go to preferences->date&time. For year-less dates, it'll auto-convert between [[October 28]] and [[28 October]], and for year-havin' dates it'll auto-convert between any of these 5: [[October 28]], [[1940]] [[28 October]] [[1940]] [[1940]] [[October 28]] [[1940]]-[[10-28]] [[1940-10-28]]
Yeah, I confess I don't really understand the point of these different formats. Is it just a "preference" thing, rather than an actual cultural standard? Who writes "1940 October 28" as standard, for instance? I would understand if the options were something like "28/10/1940" vs "10/28/1940" (American vs British dates for instance) but the chosen formats are just, um, odd. AFAIK hyphens between numbers in dates are much more common in countries like France, rather than any English speaking countries, which tend to use slashes. I recognise the last format as being common in Japan IIRC, but who would want to see that format in the middle of an English-speaking article? Or do these settings affect all users of MediaWiki?
The two most common seem to be the top two, with Americans preferring the first and many Europeans preferring the second. I suppose another
European English speakers, like, British people? :) FWIW, I would find "October 28th, 1940" the most natural.
format that was the same as the 2nd but with ordinals would please some folks as well, but perhaps it's somewhat harder to implement.
Hmm.
Steve
On 8/4/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Now that I've read the reasoning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2006_July_...)...
Here's the deal. I created this ISBN template {{ISBN}} which does nothing very exciting. It simply substitutes the text "ISBN {{{1}}}". However, my reasoning for creating it seemed sound: to provide an abstraction layer so users don't have to learn the rather arbitrary syntax that Wikipedia uses to deal with ISBN codes. Instead, they can use the same syntax they use everywhere: {{template name|argument}}.
Is this a bad idea? Personally, I find the ISBN markup extremely arbitrary and maybe not that well thought out. We apparently only allow pure ISBN numbers, with no hyphens, spaces or slashes, although they are usually presented that way in other contexts. By wrappering this syntax in standard template syntax, we would clear the way for a future, more forgiving ISBN syntax to be implemented.
....
Steve
I'm not sure what you're complaining about here. I've never had any problems with ISBN syntax, and definitely no problems with spaces, slashes or hyphens; ex, [[Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century]]'s ISBN link works fine even with hyphens in it.
~maru
On 8/5/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
However, my reasoning for creating it seemed sound: to provide an abstraction layer so users don't have to learn the rather arbitrary syntax that Wikipedia uses to deal with ISBN codes.
It's hardly a complicated syntax. It's hardly even a syntax: type "ISBN", then a space, then the number.
Similarly, although the ISBN syntax is "simple" it may not be "intuitive". What is the first reaction of people confronted with the problem of inserting an ISBN number likely to be? "How do I make this do that cool link thing?" What are they then most likely to try? {{ISBN|34895342985}} maybe?
I don't know about everyone else, but when I was learning wikisyntax I did it by opening an edit window of existing pages and seeing what was there.
In any event, the ISBN magic syntax produces a unique behaviour, a link to an automatically generated Special:Booksources page, and so it probably should be using its own syntax.[1] Using template syntax as an abstraction layer to hide the real operation is likely to confuse anyone who really wants to know how it works and takes a look at the template code.
I'm aware of the argument against magic-word-type syntax, but there are plenty of magic words in MediaWiki, most of which are very useful: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words
Of course there is room for the syntax for ISBNs, and other magic words, to be improved by making them more consistent with each other. Perhaps something like #ISBN 123456789, like the redirect syntax.
I'm just a bit dismayed by the kind of reasoning that goes on at some of these deletion debates, where instead of "is this harmful?" we have "is this needed?"
There was some reasoning that suggested it was harmful. The comment that it's pointless and sometimes harmful to have templates which use more characters than the text they produce is a good one. Sometimes a template may allow other problems to be avoided, such as {{!}}. However you mentioned {{--}}, which is a lazy duplication of the emdash in the toolbox below every edit window.
To conclude, the documentation on magic word syntaxes (in this case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISBN) should be improved and made more prominent to noobs learning how to write wiki. But I think that using templates to abstract magic words is a fairly silly proposition, it's hiding problems rather than addressing them.
-- [1] Yes, variables such as {{PAGENAME}} also use the template syntax, but they perform text substitution (an expected behaviour of templates) and are distinguished by their ALL CAPS naming.
On 8/5/06, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
It's hardly a complicated syntax. It's hardly even a syntax: type "ISBN", then a space, then the number.
I carefully avoided suggesting it was complicated :)
In any event, the ISBN magic syntax produces a unique behaviour, a link to an automatically generated Special:Booksources page, and so it probably should be using its own syntax.[1] Using template syntax as
That's not that unique. Seems to me that the standard template behaviour "put a word in {{ }} and it will be replaced with some useful text and markup" applies here.
In fact, unless I'm mistaken, you could implement {{ISBN}} directly as a standard template without the magic word at all: [[[Special:Booksources/isbn={{{1}}}|ISBN {{{1}}}]]
See the following for some examples. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevage/sandbox
Notice the last one is slightly different since it uses an external link.
All of which is to say, the "magic word", while undoubtedly useful and intuitive to those naively adding ISBN numbers (not necessarily expecting a link), is not actually necessary. And, if any bot substitution was to occur, I would actually find substitition *to* the template syntax "cleaner" than substiution to the magic word syntax.
It's more portable anyway.
an abstraction layer to hide the real operation is likely to confuse anyone who really wants to know how it works and takes a look at the template code.
Well, you could use the same argument against any templates. Using "abstraction layers to hide the real operation" is a fundamental part of making any complicated system usable by new users.
I'm aware of the argument against magic-word-type syntax, but there are plenty of magic words in MediaWiki, most of which are very useful: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words
Of course there is room for the syntax for ISBNs, and other magic words, to be improved by making them more consistent with each other. Perhaps something like #ISBN 123456789, like the redirect syntax.
or, {{ISBN|123456780}} :)
There was some reasoning that suggested it was harmful. The comment that it's pointless and sometimes harmful to have templates which use more characters than the text they produce is a good one. Sometimes a
Are we running out of disk space?
template may allow other problems to be avoided, such as {{!}}. However you mentioned {{--}}, which is a lazy duplication of the emdash in the toolbox below every edit window.
Again, personally I find it cleaner, as it's available even if you're using a different skin, with no javascript, and the list of available characters seems to be very subject to change. Bots could certainly substitute the template with the right character (much as they currently substitute — with —), but it's certainly preferable that users use {{--}} instead of just --.
To conclude, the documentation on magic word syntaxes (in this case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISBN) should be improved and made more prominent to noobs learning how to write wiki. But I think that using templates to abstract magic words is a fairly silly proposition, it's hiding problems rather than addressing them.
Well, at least it's "hiding" them in a way that when they are "addressed" they don't break anything. Template syntax has a lot going for it - the actual real syntax underneath can change without breaking anything, if it's used widely enough. IMHO, it would be a good thing if the only syntax exposed to users was "standard' MediaWiki syntax and templates. Users should use {{sup|.......}} rather than <sup>.....</sup> for instance, to decouple the semantic content (superscripted text) from the presentation layer (HTML).
Steve
On 8/6/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
All of which is to say, the "magic word", while undoubtedly useful and intuitive to those naively adding ISBN numbers (not necessarily expecting a link), is not actually necessary.
...
In fact, unless I'm mistaken, you could implement {{ISBN}} directly as a standard template without the magic word at all: [[[Special:Booksources/isbn={{{1}}}|ISBN {{{1}}}]]
You can, and that's a good way to do it. You'll have to ask the devs what their reasons were for implementing this as a magic word, rather than simply using a template (probably so thousands of existing pages would already produce links without further edits, and possibly because magic words are cheaper than templates?).
My point was that it's a bad idea to use a template as nothing more than a wrapper for the magic word; if using a template is the preferable method, then remove the magic word altogether, and only have the one behaviour.
See the following for some examples. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevage/sandbox
You're piping the link with "ISBN <number>", which the parser is picking up as a magic word and rewriting. I've edited the page to break that action - it now works as you intended.
Note that directly linking to [[Special:Booksources]] is more flexible than the magic word behaviour; it allows you to use slashes, for example.
an abstraction layer to hide the real operation is likely to confuse anyone who really wants to know how it works and takes a look at the template code.
Well, you could use the same argument against any templates. Using "abstraction layers to hide the real operation" is a fundamental part of making any complicated system usable by new users.
{{ ISBN | <number> }} which maps to [[ Special:Booksources / <number> ]] is useful, it provides a way to abstract the link to the booksources page.
However {{ ISBN | <number> }} which maps to "ISBN <number>" is not useful; the magic word syntax is already an abstraction layer, there is no need to lay another one over the top, if it does not perform any additional function of its own. Do you see my point?
You should ask the developers why this was implemented as a magic word in the first place, I'm not really sure of their reasons.
On 8/7/06, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
You're piping the link with "ISBN <number>", which the parser is picking up as a magic word and rewriting. I've edited the page to break that action - it now works as you intended.
Yeah, intriguing. I've restored the original code below for comparison. What's really bizarre is the treatment of [[test|ISBN 52859844893549]]...
In summary, it looks like: * Plain text like "ISBN 123" gets mapped to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Booksources/isbn123 * Plain text with slashes or hyphens or whatever are mapped to different URLs (slashes, fwiw, are mapped to underscores), which all behave identically - extraneous characters are treated as though they're not there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Booksources/isbn1_2-3 * You can access this page via [[Special:Booksources/isbn123]] * When a link to an ISBN page like that is piped via an "ISBN" text, the actual link is ignored, and the piped label is used instead: [[Special:Booksources/isbn123|ISBN 456]] actually links to the ISBN page for 456, and the link reads "ISBN 456".
So far so good? Well, it's odd, but explainable by the "ISBN ..." text being parsed and treated later in the cycle. Now, here's the killer: *[[Test|ISBN 456]] links to Test!
(see the example at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevage/sandbox )
That's the one I can't understand - putting "ISBN xxx" in the piped part of a link only overrides the actual link if it it's to an ISBN page. This is most unexpected. I suppose it has some strange "prevent misleading ISBN links" benefit, but it's just...odd.
To be honest, the fact that the piped label gets "interpreted" for magic words at all just looks like a bug, or an oversight, or a misfeature or whatever. From some more testing it looks like some "magic word" behaviour gets interpereted in piped links and some doesn't - http:// links *don't* override the actual link for instance.
Note that directly linking to [[Special:Booksources]] is more flexible than the magic word behaviour; it allows you to use slashes, for example.
Yes, though my insistance on slashes was a bit misguided, they're apparently not used.
{{ ISBN | <number> }} which maps to [[ Special:Booksources / <number> ]] is useful, it provides a way to abstract the link to the booksources page.
However {{ ISBN | <number> }} which maps to "ISBN <number>" is not useful; the magic word syntax is already an abstraction layer, there is no need to lay another one over the top, if it does not perform any additional function of its own. Do you see my point?
I'm not convinced that a wrapper function has to perform any additional functionality to be useful. Simply homogenising an interface for the end user can be beneficial. In this case, placing a "good" abstraction layer on top of a "bad" abstraction layer (to whatever extent "ISBN xxx" is really "bad"...) achieves that, at least. But I don't feel very strongly about it.
You should ask the developers why this was implemented as a magic word in the first place, I'm not really sure of their reasons.
Most likely it was a very quick and easy way to make a large number of existing ISBN numbers suddenly come to life.
Steve
On 8/7/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
That's the one I can't understand - putting "ISBN xxx" in the piped part of a link only overrides the actual link if it it's to an ISBN page. This is most unexpected. I suppose it has some strange "prevent misleading ISBN links" benefit, but it's just...odd.
To be honest, the fact that the piped label gets "interpreted" for magic words at all just looks like a bug, or an oversight, or a misfeature or whatever. From some more testing it looks like some "magic word" behaviour gets interpereted in piped links and some doesn't - http:// links *don't* override the actual link for instance.
It's desirable in some situations that piped text should be parsed, for example to include ''italics'' or '''bold text''' in the link (naval ships, for example, use a mix of plain and italic text in their links). The extent to which it gets parsed is interesting however, and some of these behaviours may be unexpected, perhaps this should be forwarded to Wikitech-l?
You should ask the developers why this was implemented as a magic word in the first place, I'm not really sure of their reasons.
Most likely it was a very quick and easy way to make a large number of existing ISBN numbers suddenly come to life.
Yes, I would imagine that that would be why. That's probably why so many variations will actually work and produce viable links, to account for inconsistent usage in the past.
In message f30e42de0608070717x7b6726al462b582a4d3e854e@mail.gmail.com, Stephen Bain stephen.bain-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org writes
You should ask the developers why this was implemented as a magic word in the first place, I'm not really sure of their reasons.
Most likely it was a very quick and easy way to make a large number of existing ISBN numbers suddenly come to life.
Yes, I would imagine that that would be why. That's probably why so many variations will actually work and produce viable links, to account for inconsistent usage in the past.
It's been a magic word since before I discovered Wikipedia (in early 2003), which was quite a while before we had templates.
Steve Bennett wrote:
All of which is to say, the "magic word", while undoubtedly useful and intuitive to those naively adding ISBN numbers (not necessarily expecting a link), is not actually necessary. And, if any bot substitution was to occur, I would actually find substitition *to* the template syntax "cleaner" than substiution to the magic word syntax.
It's more portable anyway.
What's your opinion on stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Njt-sta ?
On 8/7/06, SPUI drspui@gmail.com wrote:
What's your opinion on stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Njt-sta ?
Hmm, doesn't look too harmful. One downside is it creates a dependancy on a particular naming scheme [...(NJT station), ...(NCS station)...], which is discouraged by our naming conventions policy (which states that generally names should *not* be disambiguated in this manner unless needed). However, if that naming convention ever changes (eg, all the (River LINE) articles become (River Line)), then the change only has to be made in one place - a Good Thing.
Another downside is that it hides (unhelpfully) what's going on. {{njt-sta|Union}} doesn't look like a link. Everyone knows that [[Union (NJT Station)|]] is a piped link, but a template could be anything.
Also, the general downside of templates that automatically add the square brackets for you is that you can't repipe them to something better as appropriate. Maybe in some page you want the text to appear as [[Union (NJT Station)|Union Station]], while avoiding hard coding in the actual name of the article. You can't.
In general, I'm definitely in favour of wrapping any repetitive code in a template. As an example, I recently created {{noteson|...}} which simply links to a certain site with some given text. The idea being that if you're going to have 150 different links to the same site around wikipedia, it's bad if they're presented in 150 different ways.
In this particular case, I'm not sure it's incredibly helpful (redirects would to a certain extent solve the problem of pages moving), but it's not harmful either.
Steve
Thought this was funny enough to list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Gandhi_Boer_War_1899.jpg
I don't see the point in these exertions. I have provided the source, which is indeed, a "very reputable" newspaper (italics to add to your scare-quotes) and one could reasonably expect you to provide something other than bare and repeated assertion.
SV
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On 8/5/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Thought this was funny enough to list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Gandhi_Boer_War_1899.jpg
I don't see the point in these exertions. I have provided the source, which is indeed, a "very reputable" newspaper (italics to add to your scare-quotes) and one could reasonably expect you to provide something other than bare and repeated assertion.
SV
Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
by the way, this is tangentially related to a cfd that it's already past due date Category:Images claimed as photographs from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_July...
On 8/5/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Thought this was funny enough to list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Gandhi_Boer_War_1899.jpg
What *is* it? A montage of several photographs and a hell of a lot of photoshop?
Steve
Looks like a lithograph or some related process -- adds a hazy, drawn quality to photographs. Very common way of processing photos for reprinting in news sources amongst countries with less developed printing presses. The Soviet Union used this extensively throughout the 1950s; I don't know if it was ever very popular in the United States, and certainly hasn't been used there much in the 20th century. At least, this is what I recall reading somewhere, a long time ago, cobbled together with my own experience with old newspapers. I might be wrong many points, but it resembles a lot of the Soviet-era photographs I have seen, at the very least.
FF
On 8/7/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/5/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
Thought this was funny enough to list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Gandhi_Boer_War_1899.jpg
What *is* it? A montage of several photographs and a hell of a lot of photoshop?
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 8/7/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Looks like a lithograph or some related process -- adds a hazy, drawn quality to photographs. Very common way of processing photos for reprinting in news sources amongst countries with less developed printing presses. The Soviet Union used this extensively throughout the 1950s; I don't know if it was ever very popular in the United States, and certainly hasn't been used there much in the 20th century. At least, this is what I recall reading somewhere, a long time ago, cobbled together with my own experience with old newspapers. I might be wrong many points, but it resembles a lot of the Soviet-era photographs I have seen, at the very least.
Ah, so you start with a photo, then trace around the broad shapes by hand, to reproduce by printing press? Makes sense. You end up with a sharper image, but less actual detail.
Steve
--- Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/7/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Looks like a lithograph or some related process -- adds a hazy, drawn quality to photographs. Very common way of processing photos for reprinting in news sources amongst countries with less developed printing presses. The Soviet Union used this extensively throughout the 1950s; I don't know if it was ever very popular in the United States, and certainly hasn't been used there much in the 20th century. At least, this is what I recall reading somewhere, a long time ago, cobbled together with my own experience with old newspapers. I might be wrong many points, but it resembles a lot of the Soviet-era photographs I have seen, at the very least.
Ah, so you start with a photo, then trace around the broad shapes by hand, to reproduce by printing press? Makes sense. You end up with a sharper image, but less actual detail.
(Cough!) Um, I dont think that was the case in that case. At all. Hence I now make an ironic point of my finger to the title I gave this thread. ;)
The Soviet process of photo retouching strived for realism, or at least what passed for convincingness in contemporary totalitarian society. There are some good books on the subject. It was used mostly used to erase people from history, or at least in official photographs of historical people: 'Comrade Bukharin? I dont remember any "Bukharin." You have "photos," you say? Hrmph!'
-SV
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
On 8/12/06, stevertigo vertigosteve@yahoo.com wrote:
(Cough!) Um, I dont think that was the case in that case. At all. Hence I now make an ironic point of my finger to the title I gave this thread. ;)
I'm perfectly willing to concede that I can't spot a "fake" in whatever domain. I'm not an expert at everything!
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
Now that I've read the reasoning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2006_July_...)...
Here's the deal. I created this ISBN template {{ISBN}} which does nothing very exciting. It simply substitutes the text "ISBN {{{1}}}". However, my reasoning for creating it seemed sound: to provide an abstraction layer so users don't have to learn the rather arbitrary syntax that Wikipedia uses to deal with ISBN codes. Instead, they can use the same syntax they use everywhere: {{template name|argument}}.
Is this a bad idea? Personally, I find the ISBN markup extremely arbitrary and maybe not that well thought out. We apparently only allow pure ISBN numbers, with no hyphens, spaces or slashes, although they are usually presented that way in other contexts. By wrappering this syntax in standard template syntax, we would clear the way for a future, more forgiving ISBN syntax to be implemented.
[...]
You're allowed hyphens but not slashes. Are ISBNs sometimes written with slashes? If so, we'll add that to the character list. We have to be fairly conservative with the regular expression when we're detecting things in plain text. I don't think there's any need to introduce a new "abstract" syntax before we can make that change.
-- Tim Starling
On 06/08/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Is this a bad idea? Personally, I find the ISBN markup extremely arbitrary and maybe not that well thought out. We apparently only allow pure ISBN numbers, with no hyphens, spaces or slashes, although they are usually presented that way in other contexts. By wrappering this syntax in standard template syntax, we would clear the way for a future, more forgiving ISBN syntax to be implemented.
[...]
You're allowed hyphens but not slashes. Are ISBNs sometimes written with slashes? If so, we'll add that to the character list. We have to be fairly conservative with the regular expression when we're detecting things in plain text. I don't think there's any need to introduce a new "abstract" syntax before we can make that change.
Hyphens are, I believe, the only punctuation in the standard - certainly I've never encountered anything else whilst cataloguing books.
What would be nice is implementing ISBN-colon-space as well as just ISBN-space as a prefix, so that both
ISBN 0123456789 and ISBN: 0123456789
produce the booksources link.