User:Rich Farmbrough/temp67

Deprecate month, semi deprecate year.

Use of terms

Date is a general term that includes anything as or more coarsely grained than a day. Examples:

What is the date? 12th January 2011
What is the date of that magazine? June 2006
What date was 1984 published? 1948
What date would you give that furniture? Early 1870s

And do forth up to dating fossils from an era.

Current fields

The template currently supports date month and year.

These fields (as a group) fulfil two purposes, providing a publication date, and assisting in creating a Harvard reference

Publication date

The date field is used if there is one, failing that year + month, failing that year.

Harvard ref

Year is never needed for a Harvard ref, in the sense that there is a ref field and the only time the Harvard referencing cannot use the date field is when there are two works by the same name in the same year: in this case they are "Good 2006a" and "Good 2006b" (or "Good 2006" and "Good 2006a", whatever) - and in this case the "ref" field can be used (ref=Good 2006b instead of ref=harv).

Drawbacks

Duplication of data is not good
Extra blank fields get propagated by cut and paste
Having a year field set to "2006b" seems like a bad thing.
Users can fill in the year field when they have the full date and not make information available
Users can duplicate information in the 3 fields
Poeple who cut and paste the templates may update the date field and leave old values in the others or vice versa.

Advantages

Generates the Harvard ref tag from the name of the author and the non-year (2006b)

Proposal

{{{year}}} to be kept only when it is Harvard extended, or when there is a date field but it is legitimately badly formed (e.g. winter 2006). Possibly rename field {{{Harvard year}}}
- Cases where Harvard extension is used but not needed should be cleaned up separately. E.G. when there is Good2006a and no other Good2006 references. Also gaps in lettering sequence.
{{{month}}} to be merged into the {{{date}}} field and deprecated
{{{date}}} to be cleaned up where needed (e.g. 19-12-1968 etc.)

Advantages

Less fields
Less risk of inconsistency
None of the disadvantages of the above

Disadvantages

Requires a little work to bring existing articles in line.

Notes

I have fixed a bug in {{Cite book}} that may resolve a number of problems. the fix is implemented in the sandbox.
The key component it the template {{YEAR}}. This copes with many date formats, but not as many as if we could simply match \b\d{3,4}\b. Of course it is a prime candidate for improvement by template whizzes.
There are some notes on possible date formats at Template talk:Cite book/sandbox.