Template talk:LondonGazette

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] History

  • This page created by DavidCane 01:26, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Revised to use improved Gazette site with altered URL structure by DavidCane 16:46, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
  • Instructions moved to Template:LondonGazette/doc DavidCane 01:11, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
  • New optional parameter allowing linking to Edinburgh gazette or Belfast Gazette archives. --DavidCane 00:26, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request

Could the template be expanded to produce something more akin to {{cite web}} or {{cite news}} i.e. including access date, link to the London Gazette and HMSO articles? I've added Gazette references to a number of pages (e.g. Peterborough, New towns in the United Kingdom and various honour/decoration related articles) either use straight external links, or the cite templates. This could be a good alternative, but in it's present form wouldn't be compatible with the cite series which I tend to use for other references within an article.

I'll try and decipher how those templates work and see if I can add something along the lines you suggest.--DavidCane 12:05, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I probably ought to make some time and get to understand templates better myself, but it's not an avenue I've gone down yet. David Underdown 12:20, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
I've reformatted the template to use some of the tricks used in {{cite web}} including the provision of optional parameters to produce a Retrieval date. issue, date and startpage parameters have all been made mandatory.--DavidCane 01:11, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, I'd still like to see links to the Wikipedia article on the Gazette, and HMSO as publisher, but I notice that you removd these wher I had manually included them in John Sanders (musician). I would normally include equivalent info when using {{cite web}} or {{cite news}} so it seems a bit restrictive not to be able to include it in this templet (maybe with a switch like that for "Supplement"). For those who don't know what the Gazette is, it's a quick way of giving them an idea of its singular authority. Presumably the same parameters could also be used for the Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes (I'm not quite clear what goes in these rather than the London one), just using a different GeoType parameter? David Underdown 09:10, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
You are correct - by changing the GeoType= part of the URL references can be made to the Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes. I have restructed the template to use a new city parameter to allow linking to these archives (although they appear to be incomplete at present). I have also set the template so that a link to the appropriate Wikipedia article is included at the beginning of the reference - a Belfast Gazette article does not currently exist.--DavidCane 00:26, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Lovely, now I just need to go through some of the other articles where I've linked to Gazettes and use the template instead. Thanks, David Underdown 10:28, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Problem

I think there may have been a slight change to the format of url that the Gazette website is using for supplements, now seem to have just "&type=Supplement" not "&type=ArchivedSupplement". There may be other changes too. David Underdown 13:57, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

I've not been able to reproduce a problem. The example given in the Template instructions still seems to work, can you indicate which edition of the gazette was causing a problem. One thing has changed in that the old version of the site seems to have gone so the beta. part of the URL can be replaced with www. This I have now done. --DavidCane 23:51, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
It's reference 5 on Ken Macdonald, which should be going to the 2007 New Year Honours, doing a search via the website suggests that the url should be http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/ViewPDF.aspx?pdf=58196&geotype=London&gpn=1&type=Supplement&all=&exact=&atleast=&similar= which isn't what the template's generating. I'm probably missing something obvious, but I can't see it. David Underdown 19:04, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
It seems that more recent pages use "...=Issue..." or "...=Supplement..." rather than "...ArchivedIssuePage..." or "...ArchivedSupplementPage...". The cut off seems to be about 1997/98. I have added another new parameter: "notarchive=" which should be added to the links to the more recent pages to ensure they are correctly formatted. I have fixed the link in the Ken MacDonald article. --DavidCane 23:54, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. I wonder if we are going to find that this is a rolling archiving programme, could be a bit annoying from an article maintenance point of view. Perhaps we'll end up needing a bot to periodically check the links and update the template as issues get archived. David Underdown 09:36, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion

I think it would be useful to move the Gazette date out of the hyperlink to the the Gazette issue. This would allow the date to have wikilinks placed around it to enable user preferences for dates (may even be possible to handle this automatically, I'm not sure). David Underdown 11:04, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm looking at this now to see if this can be done without breaking existing formatting. It is easy enough to put the date outside the URL link, but wikifying the date is a bit more difficult.--DavidCane 02:34, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Just a note, allowing the user of the template to wikify the date may seem like a backwards step, but it helps towards the state where dates are either wikified at page level, or provided in seperate d/m/y parameters to a template. Rich Farmbrough, 19:12 13 November 2007 (GMT).
I finally found the time to finish sorting this out. The template has now been modified to put the publication date after the link. A new parameter, linkeddate, has been created to provide an option for a wikilinked date. The old date parameter remains but is ignored if linkeddate is used. See template instructions for examples of this in use. --DavidCane 23:49, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Broken links

Using Special:linksearch it appears that there are over 150 articles linking to the London Gazette in the old format url (all now broken of course), see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Linksearch&target=www.gazette-online.co.uk&namespace=&limit=250&offset=0 Some others are using the new format, but not the template, and others just link to the Gazette Online homepage and probably could be fixed to point to a specific issue. I'll try and work through some of these from time to time, but it will take a while. David Underdown 13:38, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

I've been giving this issue some thought, it looks like the linksearch is picking up only a fraction of the references which are out there for some reason. This search [1] suggests that there are 2351 pages in the English Wikipedia which contain the text "London Gazette", and this one [2] returns 1620 hits for "gazettes-online. Some of these probably don't actually contain broken references of course, but it gives us some idea of the likely size of the task. A little experimentation with http://www.gazettes-online shows that it is only the pdf (i.e. issue number) and &geotype (i.e. city) parameters which are essential. If this template were amended to make only these mandatory, it would probably be possible for someone to create a bot task to find old-style links and convert them to using the template, it appears that - slightly confusingly - supplements are actually given tehre own issue number, so we don't lose much information, and dropping this info altogether would solve the "problem" above with "archived" supplements and issues. David Underdown 16:25, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
On second thoughts, it might be better to create a second template for a bot to use with less mandatory information requirements, and maybe also put the articles into a category so they can then be manually worked to add the additional info. David Underdown 10:02, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rendering problem on John Capper

I've just been updating the London Gazette links on John Capper to use the template (since the existing ones were the old style urls), and the third use of the template doesn't seem to be rendering correctly for no reason that I can work out - the url and the link title are both visible on the page, along with the square brackets. Any ideas? David Underdown 12:15, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

This seems to have gone away as I can't see a problem with the templated links. I've just added a few more.--DavidCane 01:26, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps it was somethign to do with the way the dates used to be then. Doesn't really matter now it's fixed anyway. David Underdown 09:09, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request for quote provision

Hi - I think it would be useful if one could quote from the gazette in the reference. Could we have an optional parameter as per {{Cite web}} which allows for

{{#if: {{{quote|}}} 
  |  “{{{quote}}}”
}}

Any objections? --Matilda talk 22:43, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

This is possible, but as the template is almost invariably used inside <ref> tags. This could just be added as plain text ahead of the template. e.g.
<ref>"A Railway commencing in the City of London at a point in King William-street 20 yards or thereabouts measured in a north-westerly direction from the junction of Clements-lane..." – {{LondonGazette|linkeddate=1890-11-25|issue=26109|startpage=6519|endpage=6520|accessdate=2008-03-19}}</ref>
which would come out in the references section as:
"A Railway commencing in the City of London at a point in King William-street 20 yards or thereabouts measured in a north-westerly direction from the junction of Clements-lane..." – London Gazette: no. 26109, pages 6519–6520, 1890-11-25. Retrieved on 2008-03-19.
--DavidCane (talk) 00:21, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
The same argument could be used against having it in {[tl|cite web}}, some people seem to prefer putting a small quote in teh notes, rather than in the body text - though in that case it could equally be added as plain text after the template I suppose. David Underdown (talk) 08:39, 19 March 2008 (UTC)