Template talk:BookCitation
What do you all think about redoing this to use ref tags? -- Morris the Mata Nui Cow (talk) 02:29, 12 October 2016 (CET)
- Thanks Surel-Nuva for going through and adding the G1 books to the template! Re:Morris, I think it might be more streamlined to put all our citations in the Reference section, so I could support changing to ref tags. I'd want to see what it looked like first, though. Also, general question, how about making Template:OnlineCitation (or just Template:Citation) for sources like the story serials and short stories? Those are a large source of obscure trivia that should be cited. --Angel Bob (talk) 23:10, 25 October 2016 (CET)
Endpage/Startpage
I noticed that when there is an endpage/startpage, it ends up with two p's. For example,
{{BookCitation|BC2|chapternumber=9|startpage=164|endpage=165}}becomes Chapter 9." BIONICLE Chronicles 2: Beware the Bohrok, pp. 164-165. Thought that this does not seem intentional. ~ Wolk (talk) 21:02, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
- Nah pp. is intentional here. Typically p. stands for page and pp. for pages. -- Morris the Mata Nui Cow (talk) 23:35, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
Wall of History
(This applies to OnlineCitation and maybe others as well.)
With Wall of History giving the option to link to specific lines in books, serials, etc., I would very much like to see this incorporated into BS01's citation formats. This would make it easier on the user if they want to check a citation. I think adding an optional parameter for the Wall of History link could work. Thoughts? Dag (talk) 19:51, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
- I believe this has been discussed before, afaik no one has been against it. It would be nice if WoH also included page numbers, I don't want to lose that element of the citation; iirc it's a planned toggleable feature. I would wait until WoH has updated, as it is being updated next month. ~ Wolk (talk) 21:21, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
- OnlineCitation is a trickier one. We have our own pages for the short stories and serials, after all... But I suppose we would also want to link to the book pages, so maybe something like:
"Prologue." Swamp of Secrets. BIONICLE Legends 10, p. 6.
- I talked to JSL a while back on the TGA server about adding page numbers, but other than that, I don't know how far along that is. Regardless, my idea wasn't replacing any of the existing format BS01 uses. Maybe using Template:C to say (archived on Wall of History)? Dag (talk) 21:36, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
- Swert would have to weigh in on WoH links. Has WoH announced what the new page link format will be (will it be easy to make links using a template)? Also, for on-site links, I suspect we'd want to rework Template:BookCitation so people fill in the section link (really, the section name and the desired text) themselves instead of handling it automatically. -- Morris the Mata Nui Cow (talk) 20:49, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
Got it. Yeah I agree if we don't know the format, then we might as well wait to think about off-site links. As for the on-site links: First of all, I meant to refer to Template:OnlineCitation, not Template:BookCitation. Oops. :P Also, the citation templates are just kind of nasty currently. Implementing section links would require another big switch statement containing the abbreviation for every single piece of online media. Then a good number of cases in the switch would have to build links to sections using parser functions. That would introduce a lot of redundancy and would make OnlineCitation even harder to edit.
That said, citations actually might be a useful application of Lua scripting (so we can cut down on redundancy) or Semantic MediaWiki (so we can define the sections of serials, etc. in a way that templates could then access). I can also see some combo of those two things enabling us to auto-generate appearance sections nicely. I will talk with Swert about those possibilities. -- Morris the Mata Nui Cow (talk) 20:12, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
- The updates are well and out now, as 810 has passed by months ago by now. Here's a sample link: https://wallofhistory.com/read/?id=0J81JD&v=2&lang=en#p4-5,7 It seems each chapter of a given book has a unique ID. The #p argument of course refers to the paragraph, and as demonstrated it can mark multiple paragraphs. The lang argument is not necessary, I believe it will always default to English, though it may be useful if there is no localization? I'm not sure if there is any applicable work to test that on though, would have to ask James about that. the v(ersion) argument will default to 1 if removed. If a non-applicable number is inputted, the website will throw an error. Most works don't have multiple versions; in this case, version 2 is the Hungarian version (translated back to English), I believe? Basically, v, lang, and p are optional, each chapter has an ID would need to be inputted. ~ Wolk (talk) 07:46, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
- There's an alternative to ID that would help, a feature called semantics tags. Using this feature, the sample link can be written https://wallofhistory.com/read/?s=taleofthetoa1#p4-5,7. That should be easier to automate. --maxim21 12:31, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for bring this back up and for pointing out the semantic tags.
Going (seemingly) off-topic for a minute: Currently, BS01's citation system places an unnecessary burden on editors who want to cite individual chapters of media. For example, to cite chapter 5 of MNOG by name, you write {{OnlineCitation|MNOG|chapternumber=5|chaptername=The Undercity of Onu-Koro • A Strange Discovery}}. It's on the editor to provide the correct chapter name, even though that process could be automated away since every citation of MNOG chapter 5 will have the same chapter name. (Per a discussion on Discord, Fohrok recently filled in the chapter names for the wiki's MNOG citations. That said, using Fohrok to fill in citations is not a great long-term solution--it required a decent number of find/replace rules just to fix MNOG's citations, and after Fohrok is done, there is still a burden on editors who add citations in the future.) It'd be nice if the citation templates filled in chapter information automatically, so editors would only need to write something like {{OnlineCitation|MNOG|chapternumber=5}} or {{OnlineCitation|MNOG5}}.
Wall of History's work might help with that problem. The semantic tag system is a nice, readable way to identify books down to the chapter level, which would benefit Template:BookCitation. (BS01's current shortcut system is more thorough, since it covers media beyond just books, but the shortcuts are often less readable since they involve abbreviations that can grow long or that are similar to each other. For example, which piece of media is B:MoL, and which is MoL?)
There might be an opportunity for collaboration here. Taken together, BS01's citation templates are a pretty thorough list of media, although those lists aren't divided up to the chapter level, and the shortcut names are not necessarily readable. Meanwhile, Wall of History has a thorough list of books divided up to the chapter level, and a readable shortcut system for those books, although its list of media is not as thorough as BS01's. If the sites collaborate, they could flesh out Wall of History's semantic tag system to cover all the media BS01 needs (including media that Wall of History does not have), down to the chapter level. Then BS01 could update its citation templates to use that new system. For example, a citation to chapter 10 of The Darkness Below might become {{BookCitation|thedarknessbelowchapter10}}. Not only would the templates become more readable, but it'd also become trivial to autofill the citation templates both with chapter information and with Wall of History links. (Currently, autofilling those would require more logic in the citation templates to translate from BS01's shortcuts to Wall of History's semantic tags. It'd hardly be impossible, but it might be unpleasant. Why use two different naming conventions when one would do the trick?)
What would people here think about this change? -- Morris the Mata Nui Cow (talk) 06:25, 14 December 2022 (UTC)