Talk:Takuya Nagase

Latest comment: 2 years ago by Marchjuly in topic Bundling citations

Bundling citations edit

@Emeraude: While I can see how WP:REFBUNDLE can be helpful when you're talking lots of citations being cited, I don't think there's a significant improvement gained from bundling two citations, at least not enough to take precedence over MOS:CITEVAR. MOS:REFBUNDLE begins with "Sometimes the article is more readable if multiple citations are bundled into a single footnote."; it doesn't begin with "An artilce is always more readable if multiple citations are bundled into a single footnote".; moreover, none of the four bullet points in REFBUNDLE seem to be real problems in this specific case. WP:INTEGRITY isn't really an issue since the two sources are both for 2021. Two footnotes at the end of sentence hardly qualify as clutter, confusing or WP:CITEOVERKILL. It's also not clear how bundling two sources into one would prevent the one citation from being inadvertantly moved if the text was somehow rearranged, particularly since it's preceded by two other citations for different years. Finally, the way you bundled the citations using line breaks doesn't seem to be considered acceptable any longer; perhaps it once was thought to be OK, but now has been sort of deprecated in favor of other methods. If you scroll down to the bottom of REFBUNDLE, you'll find that it states: "However, using line breaks to separate list items breaches WP:Accessibility § Nobreaks: "Do not separate list items with line breaks (<br>))." So, if it's really necessary to bundle two citations, then perhaps it should be done some other way. -- Marchjuly (talk) 10:40, 30 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

The key is whether the article is "more readable". The sometimes/always assertion is entirely false. Having multiple ref nunbers is always a distraction, admittedly unavoidable when a named ref is having a second or third outing.
MOS:CITEVAR is totally irrelevant in this context - that is concerned with the style used in each (and every) ref, not how they fit together on the page.
There's nothing inherently wrong with using line breaks - it is not a list so much as a way of starting a new paragraph - but this does not detract from the WP:REFBUNDLE suggestion that refs should be bundled. Emeraude (talk) 13:56, 30 April 2022 (UTC)Reply
Bundling the two citations as one doesn’t make the article any more readable or more understandable, and two footnote markers isn’t any more of a distraction than one. That might make sense if we were talking many more citations (even the examples in REFBUNDLE are for three or more citations), but I don’t think it’s a very strong argument for only two citations. There’s also likely a pretty good reason why “more readable” was qualified by “sometimes” because content guidelines usually end up the way they are after quite a bit of discussion, and that probably has to do with cases like this where there doesn’t seem to be much gained from bundling. If it were truly the case that bundling two citations into one was always necessary, it clearly state that it is and it would be pretty much the de-facto method applied across all articles, which I don’t believe us the case at all.
As for CITEVAR, I believe that applies to the citation style chosen throughout the article as a whole, and this includes how they fit together as explained in WP:CS#To be avoided.
Finally, it clearly states that the line breaks you’re are not in compliance with MOS:NOBREAKS. What you’ve done is created an unbulleted list with of two elements; not two separate paragraphs. The same MOS:ACCESS issues about linebreaks is also specifically referred to in H:CITEMERGE#Syntax; so, it seems that bundling in this way is considered to be more of list issue than not. There wouldn’t be a separate example given for “Paragraph format” if the two approaches were considered equivalent. — Marchjuly (talk) 15:02, 30 April 2022 (UTC)Reply