Talk:Nuper rosarum flores

Good stuff

Nice article. I particularly appreciated the translation of the motet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.72.74.207 (talk) 10:10, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

Latest edit

I'm afraid I am not convinced that the edits of 15 June 2007 are an improvement, but am unwilling to get into any kind of a revert war. Perhaps the person who made the edits could explain them here...? --Wspencer11 (talk to me...) 13:19, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

References

Could Dr. Kohl please explain what makes my admittedly inexperienced attempt to clean up the in-line references arbitrary? Thanks! --Wspencer11 (talk to me...) 20:21, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

I am pleased to do so. This could get tedious, but please bear with me. The changes were arbitrary because you gave no reason for changing from one approved Wikipedia format to another. You are probably not aware that Wikipedia is far from having a uniform citation style, though discussions are ongoing here, and more discussion of the subject can be found here. The present guidelines on How to present citations specify that "Each article should use the same method throughout. If an article already has citations, adopt the method in use or seek consensus before changing it." The section Wikipedia:Citing_sources#How_to_present_citations lists five broad categories of citation styles that are acceptable for Wikipedia. Three of these are for inline citations: footnotes, shortened footnotes, and parenthetical referencing.

Each of these broad categories has numerous subdivisions, both major and minor. It may not be immediately apparent, but the format used in the list of References here is Chicago style (alphabetized, inverted author names, elements separated by periods, year of publication following author name without other punctuation, etc.). This is one of several citation styles collectively referred to as "Harvard style", which are designed for use with "author-date" inline citations using parenthetical referencing. Author-date referencing requires the year of publication as well as the last name(s) of the author(s) for inline citations, and Chicago style in particular specifies that the abbreviation "p." or "pp." not be used.

You made three changes to the inline citations, (1) converting parenthetical referencing to footnotes, (2) deleting the years of publication in some (but not all) of them, and (3) adding the abbreviation "p." in front of page numbers. In addition, punctuation within these references was inconsistent. These inconsistencies can be easily corrected, of course, and author-date references can be put into footnotes, but they are not really designed for this. Properly used, footnote citations should include all of the bibliographic data for a reference the first time it is cited. In traditional, print media, subsequent references to the same source use a shortened reference of one sort or another. On Wikipedia this is problematic, since editorial changes go on more or less continuously, and the removal of a sentence or paragraph may accidentally delete the main reference listing, or a shortened ref may be moved to a position before the first one with the complete data. As a result, the entire bibliographical apparatus needs to be repeated each time, except where the identical page reference occurs, in which case the references can be ganged together with a template. There is also the issue of whether a complete list of references should be used in addition to the footnotes. It is largely for this reason that I and a minority of other editors prefer parenthetical referencing to footnotes.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:36, 27 August 2010 (UTC)