Talk:Bentham & Hooker system

Referencing style

It is observed that the use of a cite template, as used in inline citations has been done since creation of the article in 2006, followed by inline citation appearing in July 2016 vide this diff. However, Harvard style referencing appears in February 2017 vide this diff. It is proposed to convert all the references of the article to inline citation, rather than Harvard style, to maintain uniformity. Other articles in Botany appear to be predominantly using inline citations. Comments requested please.

Michael Goodyear, as a major contributor, your opinion is solicited. AshLin (talk) 19:50, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Oppose: I beg to differ from the suggestion that in line is predominant, without doing a body count. Changing this would not produce uniformity - and indeed all my GA and FA on that project use harvard. More to the point when I wrote the guidance on style for the project at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Plants/Template I pointed out, after considerable discussion with project members, the advantages of adopting harvard. These are predominantly ease of reading and editing wikitext with minimal clutter, hence the template short footnote. I realise that does not mean that everyone did. I think sometimes we waste a lot of time imposing particular citation styles on individual pages, which don't improve their appearance or accessibility. I would argue strongly against changing the style in the project without reaching a concensus amongst members. I suspect the outcome would be that it does not matter, what is more important is uniformity of style within a page. --Michael Goodyear ✐  ✉ 20:08, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, I do not usually work on articles in this field, so its good to know. AshLin (talk) 20:18, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

OK. Glad to be of help. On closer inspection, there was only one inline so I switched it. Also fixed some other issues. --Michael Goodyear ✐  ✉ 20:25, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

A couple of points:

• "Harvard style referencing" means putting citations like "Singh (2004)" in the running text. This is an allowed style, but very few Wikipedia articles used it, in my experience. The system used here (and consistently by Michael Goodyear elsewhere) is not Harvard style referencing. It has numerical inline citations which go to Harvard style footnotes which then link to Bibliography entries. I don't usually bother with this three stage approach on shorter articles, but it's useful when different sections (chapters, pages) of the same source are used as references. It avoids the style I really dislike in which ^[1]:212 is used to mean p. 212 of whatever [1] turns out to be when you click on it. I find this a really annoying style, because it separates the information needed to look up a reference between the article (the page number) and the references list (the rest of the reference).
• WP:CITEVAR is very clear that existing citation styles should not be changed without consensus. I don't think that any agreement (supposing there was one) by a WikiProject could replace this general content guideline.

By the way, small caps and ligatures are absolutely frowned on in the MOS, and should be fixed in the article. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:16, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

I suspect someone was to trying to emulate the style of the source document. I have seen this in quite a few historical system pages.--Michael Goodyear ✐  ✉ 18:24, 22 March 2018 (UTC)