Talk:Christopher Middleton (navigator)

Let's deprecate this article's Harvard style referencing

In December 2019 Jay D. Easy made edits that added some referenced footnotes to this article. [1]

They chose to use the technically policy-compliant, but rarely used harvard style referencing, rather than the almost overwhelming used <ref></ref> citation style. They did not, however, explain why they chose harvard style referencing.

I have been contributing to the wikipedia long enough to remember when articles never used footnote style references, because there was no technical support for them.

This article was started in 2005 - before there was technical support for footnote style referencing.

When footnote style referencing became possible several referencing styles were introduced. I used one similar to the harvard style, before I encountered the <ref></ref> citation style.

Several wikidocuments were written during the shakeout period, which warned contributors to never mix citation styles. It was good advice, as the citation styles were generally incompatible.

It only took a few years for the <ref></ref> citation style to almost totally supplant the earlier citation styles. I encountered dozens of articles I started, using the earlier style, where other contributors added <ref></ref> citation style, making a huge mess. The references would be a mess, with two different references with the footnote ^{[1], [2]}. Their use of incompatible citation styles was no doubt innocent, so I updated all the earlier references to the most popular citation style. And, when I worked on earlier articles I started, I automatically updated them to use the most popular citation style.

In recent years, approximately twice a year, an aggressive, inherently well-meaning contributor will make an ill-informed challenge to me over my use of WP:inline references, claiming it violates the proscription against changing citation styles. These well-meaning but ill-informed contributors don't understand what the wikidocuments mean by a citation style, and don't unders

So, I know I am not authorized to rewrite this article to use the common citation style, without raising my concerns here.

My concern is that, even though use of Harvard style is policy compliant, it is not easily maintainable, since practically no one understands how to use it, in detail. In this particular case the article has no long history of using harvard style, and there is no obvious advantage to using it, so it should, in my opinion, be rewritten to use the well-known common style.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:57, 4 February 2020 (UTC)