Wikipedia talk:Harvard referencing
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[edit] Disagreement about placing references w.r.t. punctuation
It is mentioned: "Linking to the article using an embedded link, like this. [1] Embedded links, like footnotes, are placed after punctuation." Nobody taught me this, but the following bindings have always been implicit to me:
- The '[1]' above should immediately follow the period (no leading space) because it binds to the sentence. The space disconnects it visually and syntactically.
- Embedded links, like footnotes, should be placed after the thing in question. If the reference modifies a sentence, it should follow the sentence' stop, as the stop is syntactically part of the sentence. If the reference modifies just a phrase, it should precede the phrase' stop; that is it should immediately follow the phrase itself, as the stops are parts of sentences and not of constituent phrases which sit amoung that syntax. Placing an embedded link or footnote after a stop is "too late" to modify that phrase as a new phrase has begun (and so, to me, visually and syntactically modifies nothing, or a null thing). Placing it after the full stop modifies the entire sentence, and if the link or footnote isn't for the entire sentence then it is misleading.
Christian Campbell 13:40, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] For LHOON
LHOON, could you say what you mean by: "It also may be considered to put a too strong emphasis on the identity of the author and on the year of publication." Cheers, SlimVirgin (talk) 07:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
My argument is as follows: a Harvard reference like (Smith, 2004) puts the main emphasis on both the name Smith and the year 2004. The name may or may not be relevant, but as a scholarly article should focus on the underlying facts rather than on individual authors, I prefer to put this information in a footnote or reference list rather than into the text body. This is particularly the case with an extended number of references, where all parenthetic referencing tends to clutter the page layout more than when numeric references are used. Furthermore, the explicit mentioning of author names in the article body tends to imply the attribution of a certain authority (which may go all the way to a personality cult) to individuals, which is contrary to the scientific method of free examination (implying the rejection of personal authority) and to the personal humility which characterises the true great mind who realises to be only to be a tiny observer in the great universe. Certainly, anyone's work should be properly referenced and credited, but this is perfectly done by numeric or footnote referencing systems. As for mentioning the year, there is the danger for a judgment too much focusing on recent findings (recentism) with an a priori bias against older sources which may prove their value even in advanced research topics. LHOON 08:44, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
- I'd say those are very personal views, LHOON. SlimVirgin (talk) 09:50, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
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- They are indeed, which does not mean they are not to be discussed about though! ;-) LHOON 10:22, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Mixing Harvard and Chicago
There is a debate here over whether it is allowable to mix the Chicago and Harvard styles of referencing (like Saffron or Charles Darwin). The debate also concerns a seemingly unclear part of HARV, viz. the Templates section. Please join the discussion at WIAFA talk. Mikker (...) 02:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Bad link
The web page referenced as ""Writing with Sources: A Guide for Harvard Students" by Gordon Harvey, retrieved October 18, 2005" in the references section is not fully functional. From the Internet Archive, it seems that the last fully functional version was http://web.archive.org/web/20060118054510/http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/. Jorge Peixoto 23:24, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Cite.php technology for Harvard referencing?
Is there any fundamental technical or stylistic objection to having a program similar to Cite.php (or an option within Cite.php itself) that would generate Harvard references with an automatically alphabetized reference list (in Harvard style of course) and automatically generated links and backlinks between the references and the reference list? And if not—is it because Wikipedia is moving toward deprecation of Harvard references? (I would hope not!) —Neuromath 02:31, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] New "add-on" template for citing page numbers in Harvard style with Cite.php
In the case of a single source being cited many, many times in one article Cite.php only allows for two results: Either a whole boatload of redundant lines under <references />, or one huge citation line that has so many page numbers listed it is useless, and might even include almost every page in any entire book. Template:Rp solves this (until Cite.php itself is made smarter, anyway), by enabling easy addition of Harvard-style page-number citations, such that the results look like: Alleged fact.[4]:18-9 The template discourages use where this is not necessary, of course. If a reference is only cited 4 times in an article, {{Rp}} is not called for. NB: The point of this is also that {{Ref harv}} is incredibly tedious and error-prone under these specific circumstances (though otherwise useful in other circumstances). Try using {{Ref harv}} 50 times in the same article to cite different pages in the same source and you'll see what I mean. Even remembering what ID to use is pretty much impossible after a while, and soon becomes an out-of-order mess, because the ID numbers do not auto-reorganize if material is moved around, as it often is. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:31, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
- PS: See Talk:Glossary of cue sports terms#The page number problem for the "origin story". — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:43, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
