Talk:Christopher Middleton (navigator)

Let's deprecate this article's Harvard style referencing

In December 2019 Jay D. Easy made edits that added some referenced footnotes to this article. [1]

They chose to use the technically policy-compliant, but rarely used harvard style referencing, rather than the almost overwhelming used <ref></ref> citation style. They did not, however, explain why they chose harvard style referencing.

I have been contributing to the wikipedia long enough to remember when articles never used footnote style references, because there was no technical support for them.

This article was started in 2005 - before there was technical support for footnote style referencing.

When footnote style referencing became possible several referencing styles were introduced. I used one similar to the harvard style, before I encountered the <ref></ref> citation style.

Several wikidocuments were written during the shakeout period, which warned contributors to never mix citation styles. It was good advice, as the citation styles were generally incompatible.

It only took a few years for the <ref></ref> citation style to almost totally supplant the earlier citation styles. I encountered dozens of articles I started, using the earlier style, where other contributors added <ref></ref> citation style, making a huge mess. The references would be a mess, with two different references with the footnote ^{[1], [2]}. Their use of incompatible citation styles was no doubt innocent, so I updated all the earlier references to the most popular citation style. And, when I worked on earlier articles I started, I automatically updated them to use the most popular citation style.

In recent years, approximately twice a year, an aggressive, inherently well-meaning contributor will make an ill-informed challenge to me over my use of WP:inline references, claiming it violates the proscription against changing citation styles. These well-meaning but ill-informed contributors don't understand what the wikidocuments mean by a citation style, and don't unders

So, I know I am not authorized to rewrite this article to use the common citation style, without raising my concerns here.

My concern is that, even though use of Harvard style is policy compliant, it is not easily maintainable, since practically no one understands how to use it, in detail. In this particular case the article has no long history of using harvard style, and there is no obvious advantage to using it, so it should, in my opinion, be rewritten to use the well-known common style.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:57, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

The edits added in-line citations to an article that had none. That is a good thing. Whether repeated citations use self-closed ref tags or sfn tags (used in over 94,000 articles, so they can't be that hard to figure out) is a matter of taste; they are both pretty easy to use, especially for editors used to working on articles that are GA/FA/A-class in quality. Adding an infobox is often a good thing as well, since it provides a familiar summary of a biography to readers in an easy-to-skim format. The only bit I question is the addition of the Polar exploration navbox, since Middleton does not appear to be mentioned in this navbox. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:32, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

• When I first learned computer programming an older person told me something they were told by an early programmer they had to learn from. That guy had learned to program in assembly language, before Fortran and later high level languages were in use. Their assembly language programs were not well documented. Their explanation? "It was hard to write, it should be hard to read."

  So, no, Jonesey95 the rarely used citation styles are not easy to figure out - particularly when almost all of our contributors are unaware that there are alternative citation styles. Geo Swan (talk) 09:15, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Geo Swan: In the best of all possible worlds, the WP Foundation would hire some paid editors to go through all the articles, starting with the most popular and the FA/GA and bring their citations all to the Harv standard. Now, we are not in that world. I am comfortable with Harv style because that's what's common in the academic world, or at least my field. I have been berated in the past for not endorsing WP Policy, and I reserve the right to deviate in the future, but this one is not a hill I am willing to die on. My basic policy is to follow the harv style when I can in the articles I start. When I am working in an article that someone else is shepherding, then it's a judgement call. Usually I am there because I am adding a link, or it is my lane. I then try to improve the article a little. That may involve little more that correcting typos, and issues of grammar and style. Sometimes I will work on the citations, or at least a subset. Sometimes I will do a little research to add info. I don't go looking for articles to fix, I have enough to do in fixing my own and generating new ones, but again, if I come across an article where a little tweaking would improve it, I'll do that. It does mean that the article may mix citation styles, but WP is a work in progress that I hope is slowly moving to improvement. Regards, Acad Ronin (talk) 01:08, 6 February 2020 (UTC)