Bryan Derksen wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
I've learned, personally, {{cite web}} and {{cite book}}'s fundamentals, and look stuff up from time to time. I've also created subst:able templates for reference works I cite a lot, so I don't have to do the thinking.
Way back when I was doing a bunch of work citing various articles about Stargate subjects and I kept using the same episode citations over and over. I considered creating a group of templates specifically for those cites, for example
<ref>{{cite stargate sg-1/broca's gap}}</ref>
So I wouldn't have to keep looking up airdates and other details to fill in, and if the citation format changed or more information became available they could all be updated with a single edit. Perhaps some sort of formalized system along these lines might be useful for common references? <ref>{{cite collection/Oxford dictionary 2006}}, p. 1245</ref> for example. These big bibliographic lists would then become collections of templates like this and they'd make better project pages.
I really like this idea. It seems to me that even if it is not likely to be immediately useful for all articles, the ones that have major wikiprojects and a limited number of well known sources could not only use this to great effect but we would also have the ability to use "what links here" to see which articles are using a specific book as a reference (which is especially useful for things like published scientific papers where someone might have published conflicting results.)
SKL