Template talk:Cite Banglapedia

Suggestions

Moved from User talk:Kayser Ahmad

 – I didn't expect the template to attract wider attention, but through the miracle of wiki... Worldbruce (talk) 18:02, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

{{Cite Banglapedia}} should follow the conventions of other source templates. A few initial observations based on a lifetime's experience as a software engineer:

• Automatically linking author names is unwise. Some authors meet the notability guidelines, but most do not. Creating many red links with no prospect of them turning blue would be undesirable. Also, automatic linking is likely to generate many inaccurate links, to disambiguation pages or similarly named people other than the author. It would be better to force the user to pass an author-link parameter.
• Using chapter-url for a portion of the article title url is unwise for two reasons. First, although some templates construct a full url from a special parameter (as {{EB1911}} does with wstitle), the wiki community has considerable control over the structure of wikisource urls, but no control over the structure of Banglapedia urls. Today it may seem easy to construct Banglapedia urls from a parameter, but that may not always be so. They have in the past used more opaque urls like http://www.banglapedia.org/HT/M_0257.htm, and could do so again. Second, Wikipedians expect chapter to be used with chapter-url and title to be used with title-url, not title to be used with chapter-url. A better design would be to not use chapter-url at all and pass the full url in the url parameter.
• Although most Banglapedia articles have a single author, some have as many as five. The template should be able to display multiple authors. {{Cite encyclopedia}} may be more constrained in this regard than more common templates like {{cite book}}. Alternatives include basing {{cite Banglapedia}} on {{cite book}}, getting {{cite encyclopedia}} generalized to work more like other source templates, or living with {{cite encyclopedia}}'s limitations.
• It should allow authors to be specified using either last and first parameters, or the author parameter, because Wikipedians are accustomed to having that choice and because it should fit in with other source templates being used in an article.

I've created Template:Cite Banglapedia/testcases with some cases I believe the template should be made to handle. Creating a robust template is not simple. Kudos for tackling the task. --Worldbruce (talk) 15:32, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

I suggest for base template using {{cite book}} . Kayser Ahmad (talk) 06:39, 27 February 2017 (UTC)