Talk:Jack Wasserman

German Canadian?

Maybe. And it's not as if his family might not have been from Germany, but I think this is a Jewish name.....Skookum1 00:56, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

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List-defined references

I restored an additional reference lost during an edit conflict.

By far our most commonly used reference style is what is sometimes called the footnote style. Footnote style references are either defined in the body of the article, or in the reference section - so called "list defined references". In this style instances where named references are used look like this: <ref name=ARefName/>

This style is so common that many contributors, even very experienced contributors, don't realize there are other styles. I used to find good faith contributors admonishing me for introducing new references in the reference section. They incorrectly thought list defined references were of a different style from body defined references.

In discussions over this confusion I became pretty familiar with a couple of clauses in our guidelines that say, paraphrasing from memory, the first contributor to add references to an article can choose their favourite style, but subsequent contributors are requested to not use their favourite style when adding new references, or to change existing references to a their favourite style. Paraphrasing from memory, they are requested to conform to the style of the earlier references.

Another contributor has added references that look like {{r|ARefName}}.

There were strong reasons why the guidelines, drafted in 2006, strongly recommended not mixing references styles. They were incompatible, could not be mixed without causing chaos.

I was able to mix my footnote style with the {{r|ARefName}} style. But it was hard work. I had to test to see if it worked. So I am going to request the MC reference be changed to the footnote style, so it doesn't confuse other contributors.

Thanks! Geo Swan (talk) 22:51, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

• The {{r}} template works fine with list-defined references. It's effectively an abbreviation of <ref name=xxx/>. See Template:R for details. Apart from being shorter, it has the advantage of being able to take multiple names. For example:

{{r|Aref|Bref|Cref}} is equivalent to <ref name=Aref/><ref name=Bref/><ref name=Cref/>

Anyway, I wasn't aware that anyone else was working on the topic – I thought the stuff I found was some old fragments. The main thing is to avoid edit conflicts so I'll be off to bed soon.

Andrew🐉(talk) 23:14, 20 January 2021 (UTC)