User talk:Colonies Chris/Archive/2024/Jan

Linking publishers

Apparently I've had the wrong discussion link in the edit summary on the Kennedy 1998 template, but I've been asked to make that change before for FACs and A-Class reviews. It's unclear to me why this change needs to be made/should be made. Is it related to this mainly cosmetic edit at William Y. Slack? Linking publishers provides the reader with additional context as to who is publishing these works - for instance, is a publisher an academic publisher, a popular press publisher, or something else like a predatory outlet. It's unclear to me why these changes should be forced upon an article in drive-by fashion with neither prior discussion nor explanation. Hog Farm _Talk 21:41, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

@Hog Farm: If the publisher is known to produce publications of questionable accuracy, they should not be used in citations at all. That decision should be made by the editor, not by the reader, who has a right to assume that the editors have done ther best to only draw on reliable sources. Colonies Chris (talk) 21:51, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Do you have a consensus on this at all? Because it is normal to link publishers. If you don't have consensus to be making these changes, you shouldn't be making them. Hog Farm _Talk 21:53, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

@Hog Farm:It is not normal to link publishers. I've been a Wikipedia editor for 18 years, and I've edited thousands of page, so I can categorically state that linking publishers is not normal. For more evidence look at {{Cite book#Publisher}}, for example.

Publisher: May be wikilinked if relevant.

. This statement exists only because the default is not to link. Just being the publisher is not sufficent in itself to justify a link. Colonies Chris (talk) 23:35, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Just a note that in my experience, whether or not most Wikipedia articles link publishers, it is perfectly acceptable for an article to link the publisher as long as it is consistent article-to-article. It's reasonable to imagine readers may want to learn more about a publisher-- I for one know that when I read and see a publisher I am not familiar with, I want to learn more, even if they turn out to be reputable. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 02:36, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

If the WP:CITEVAR used in the article links publishers, then publishers are linked, and Colonies Chris, you should stop changing them. Consistency is what matters, and increasingly, citations are carried from one language Wikipedia to another, where not all readers may be familiar with all publishers. There is no page that says publishers shouldn't be wikilinked, as they are in many Featured articles, so please stop changing them. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:19, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

(←) WP:CITEVAR is all about citation styles, and makes it clear that this means not changing between, for example, APA style and ASA style. Linking or not linking publisher is not part of a style in that sense - it's a simple matter of whether the link is likely to be useful - the same test that applies to linking in general. Most readers don't look at the refs at all, and those who do are most likely wanting to verify a specific statement that they find surprising or questionable. A publisher link, especially to a large generaist publisher, is not helpful for that purpose. In general, for any possible link, there's always someone who will say that they find it useful, but we don't link on that basis, that woukld lead to linking everything. That's what the overlinking debate a decade ago was all about: it was definitively resolved on the side of smart linking, not a scattershot approach. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:32, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

I’m not sure that the average reader is as familiar with publishers, even generalist ones, as they are with other topics that would normally be considered overlinked. And I think it entirely valid to consider linking a publisher valid for assessing reliability, in the same way that we may link notable authors of works or news organizations. It may not be the work itself, but supplies relevant context for assessment. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 13:17, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

First of all, any publisher that isn't considered a reliable source shouldn't be in the citations at all - that's the job of the editor, not the reader. Yes, the average reader is probably not familiar with publishers, but the average reader doesn't look at the refs at all - and when they do, the publisher is the last thing they're interested in. In the exceedingly rare case where a reader wants to find out about the publisher (and that would be even less common than researching the author or locating the publication), they can easily copy and paste into the search box, just as with anything else. We don't just link anything and everything on the slight chance a very occasional reader might find it useful. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:54, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Huge diffs, and untagged AWB edits; any ideas?

Hi, Chris, I couldn't figure out from the gigantic diff in this edit what you actually wanted to change there, and since everything I could see was just pointless variation from AWB (probably their "gen. fixes": changing capitalization, param or redirect names, etc. that were okay before) I had to revert the whole thing because I couldn't see what you were going for. If you remember what brought you there a week ago and want to reapply the substantive change manually, please do.

I probably wouldn't have bothered you with this at all, but actually the reason I'm taking the time to write, is that at first, I didn't realize that AWB was involved because it is not tagged in the revision history for that edit. But as I started to scroll down the long diff, it was very obvious that that's what it was. Taking a look at your rev history to double-check, I noticed that that edit was at the start of this AWB run of 61 edits. What struck me about that was that even though 60 of them have the edit summary you supplied ("minor fixes"), only 57 of them have "Tag: AWB", meaning three do not, including rev. 1188431220. This is problematic, because basically, I didn't know where to go to complain about this; was it your doing? (seriously doubt it); was it AWB? (maybe/probably) is it a problem in the tagging mechanism in the rev history somehow? (who knows). If you have any clue why that edit wasn't tagged 'AWB', it would help to know. I may open a discussion at WP:VPT to investigate this, and if so I'll need your help to describe what you were doing, so they can try to figure out what happened and why it wasn't tagged, along with the other two that weren't. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:25, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi Mathglot - first of all, yes those changes were made using AWB, and no I didn't change anything within AWB, so I don't see why they weren't tagged too.

Secondly, about your reverting my changes because you didn't understand them - have you heard of WP:AGF? If you had questions, you could have come and asked me. And why invite me to only reinstate only my 'substantive' changes = are you saying that AWB genfixes, when performed in conjunction with more substantial changes, are not legitimate? They are all improvements, albeit minor ones, so why reject them? Colonies Chris (talk) 10:08, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

I didn't have any questions about the changes made by AWB, and I did understand them. What I didn't understand, was what your original intent was, i.e., what your intended change was that brought you there in the first place. I am well aware of WP:DONTREVERT in an essay I agree with that says one should revert only when necessary, and rather than revert, one should change only the bad part and keep the good part (WP:MASSR), but that is the key point: I wasn't able to find the good stuff because the diff was so huge; partly that's the fault of AWB, which piled on a lot of stuff around whatever it was you wanted to change, which made the beneficial part impossible to locate.

To your question: yes, I am saying that genfixes when not accompanied by a substantive change are illegitimate if they violate MOS:VAR and/or WP:CITEVAR guideline, which in this case, they did. For example: changing {{toc limit}} to {{TOC limit}} when the previous version was already working, is not an improvement, it's just an editor's choice between two variations, both of which work. Same thing with the change of {{slink}} to {{section link}}, {{citec}} (which I really prefer because it calls to mind "cite chapter") to {{harvc} (which brings nothing to mind, and is worse), and so on. The change to the |publisher= citation param to remove the wikilink has no basis in policy, guideline, or even a supplementary info page, and makes the page (very slightly) worse in my opinion, due to lost ease of use—not a big deal by any means, but neither was it necessary, and should have been left as it was before, when the link made it it just a tiny little bit better imho, as well as being in accordance with the template doc for citation params.

The second sentence at MOS:VAR quotes the Arbitration Committee and delineates why changes like these should not be done. The sentence after that one is even stronger, and is styled as a one-sentence paragraph to emphasize the point:

Edit-warring over style, or enforcing optional style in a bot-like fashion without prior consensus, is never acceptable.

You made a legitimate, bold move with that edit, and I don't have a problem with that. I reverted, and I hope you don't have a problem with that, either. That leaves us at "discussion" if we are following WP:BRD. Using AWB is nothing if not "bot-like", and using AWB (or manual edits) to enforce a style that you prefer over an equal one that I prefer is not a legitimate use of AWB as I understand the guideline, especially when it does not improve the page in some way. I object to such optional changes when the page was working and compliant with all policies and guidelines before, and I ask that you not make changes of that sort to that page. I do assume good faith on your part, which is why I still invite you to make the substantive change you came there to make in the first place if you wish to, or if you point me to where it is in the diff, I will restore it for you upon request. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 11:05, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

To clarify - the genfixes were made in conjunction with substantive changes - I said that above and you have misrepresented me. Again, you could have just asked me, particularly as none of the changes you object to are in any way wrong - they're just not to your liking. Your invocation of MOS:CITEVAR is irrelevant here - that's all about not changing citation styles, e.g. from APA style to ASA style. It shouldn't be interpreted as forbidding any change whatever to citations without prior agreement - that would be, absurdly, to apply a more restrictive rule to citations than to the body of the article. Colonies Chris (talk) 13:53, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Substing of {{Title year}}

Hi Colonies Chris. I was wondering what was the rationale for substing {{Title year}} in Category:2003 in Formula One, Category:2004 in Formula One, etc? Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 09:19, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

HI DH85868993 - There's no benefit - and there is a cost - to dynamically building in the year each time these categories are used - each of those categories only refers to one year ever. I suspect they were probably built that way as an easy method of constructing a lot of year categories in one go. Colonies Chris (talk) 09:33, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks for the reply. DH85868993 (talk) 09:47, 18 December 2023 (UTC)