It is not a matter of learning any specific cite template that is the problem. All of them have sufficient documentation to make them usable. The problem is that in about 80% of the cases that I have used them (almost always referring to a web page of varying degrees of officialness and sometimes news web pages) the correct cite template to use is very very very far from obvious.
SKL
Akash Mehta wrote:
Would it make sense to start a WikiProject for organising skilled labour that can take basic data submitted by users and insert it into articles in the form of cite templates in <ref>'s?
On 9/2/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/2/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The cite templates are byzantine. I'm not going to figure them all out any more than I'm going to learn every variety of stub template - I know a few, but often I'll just put {{stub}} and let someone who wants to pick the precisely correct one. I hope this comes across more as "division of labour" than "too lazy to do it properly" ;-)
Part of the Wiki way is the fact that your work doesn't have to be 'finished' before you put it up.
In terms of the cite templates, someone who knows nothing about the actual reference should be able to turn a handwritten reference line into a templated one, so those who care about that can do it themselves.
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.
-Matt _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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