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