Forums: Helping Hand > Book/Sourcebook Infobox Change Proposal
Use the following template for a nicely presented post:
{{Forum post|Write your message here!|~~~~}}
While grabbing citations for various sourcebooks for the spells, I realized there was a new parameter we could add to the infobox for books: a Citation Template!
We could use an inline template similar to the ones used on the magazine pages, and put it into the infobox for each sourcebook/novel infobox. That way each book would have a ready-made citation template ready to use, with just one click.
I imagine this would involve significant manual editing if we do it, unless a bot can do it. But it would make citing books a much easier process.
Thoughts?
Sounds like a nice feature to me! To avoid overcomplication, we could simply define a field or place where to put that manually, and let it be filled by interested authors over time as usual?
There would need to be a way to include multiple citation templates for boxed sets and the like.
Good point. I think we could keep it simple though. For example, with drsup, each new issue, we just change the issue number, so {{drsup/123/article name}} and then {{drsup/124/article name}}.
So for boxed sets, we could do {{bksup/Boxed set name/Boxed set accessory}} instead of {{bksup/sourcebook}}
Those little
[citation template] things have never been useful to me except sometimes to confirm that a citation template exists (unless it is is misspelled in one of the two places). What do people use them for? They take you to the Cite Foo template page, but that doesn't help me when I'm editing. The auto-suggest as I type is much more handy and I use it
all the time. I'm not opposed to adding a field the to the {{
Book}} template, I'm just curious what people use those links for.
I'm just curious what people use those links for.
I found them very helpful when I was new here (they were invaluable when we were able to use the monobook theme), and I still use them today. I think they are helpful for new editors to access citations. They help if a new editor is learning how to cite a source. The autofill is useful too, I've learned to love it since we were forced to use the default theme. I think having as many resources as possible for a new editor to cite their source would help our wiki. It's not crucial though, especially if it involves adding them manually (that's a lot of edits!).
So I looked into it, and lo and behold the Book template has had cite fields since I put them there in 2015! However, they assume there are different editions of the book, so I could probably make them a bit smarter and automatically generate link to the citation if there is only one edition or something. I'll think about it.
I have added a default link to the citation template for any {{
Book}} pages. It's not 100% fool-proof yet, but the vast majority of Book pages should now have a link to the citation for that book.
Amazing. I have
tried to find a way to include multiple templates for boxed sets and the like by including them in the "basic" citation template, only to see that
you have beat me to it by three years, Movie :-)!
Now someone "only" needed to add those for all boxed sets...
While we are at it, we could also add citation templates for associated web enhancement that way.
Hello! I found a special case where the current template does not solve all our problems: When there are several books of different editions with the same name. I found
Unearthed Arcana 1st edition,
Draconomicon (1990) and
Underdark (4th edition sourcebook). An easy solution would be to change the name of the book to the name of the respective article, but that would not be 100 % correct. Is there a better solution? Thanks a lot!
How about if we use the name of the page just for the citation link? Is there any case where that won't work?
Okay, then I will add a new parameter where the proper link title can be added to the infobox.
