Talk:Ramsay Weston Phipps

London Gazette

Please could you leave in the temapltes - virtually every other reference in Wikipedia to it uses the templates, and the it helps manage these refrences centrally - they have a habit of chaning their url structure every so often, and the template means all the links can be fixed automatically rather than (as I have done in the past) spend hours tracking down and fixing every single instance Wikipedia-wide. David Underdown (talk) 09:06, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I'd rather not. They don't need the links. The other citations don't use the templates, and I'm planning to take this article further than B class, so the citations will all have to have the same structure. auntieruth (talk) 17:00, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

The whole point of an online encyclopaeida is that you can link - and arguably WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT if you've used an online source you absolutely should link. The census information looks rather like it's come from Ancestry too, so it would be courteous to link that too. There's no real differnce in teh structure, it just provides more infomration for the reader. David Underdown (talk) 17:21, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it does come from ancestry, but that is subscription. The obit etc. is also on line, but I have access through the university, and I've given all the information necessary to find it. I see no need to link. During an FAC, I was told definitely not to link to google books, for example, after I had painstakingly put in all the links to German Unification. auntieruth (talk) 17:35, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

So long as you say it's subscription, it doesn't matter (and in the UK msot people can get free access via their local library anyway). Google books seems to be felt to eb a bit different for some reason, though I odn't fully understand why, I think sometimes people worry that you've only read what may only be snippets, and not understood the full context. Adding links helps reders to evaluate sources for themselves. Yes The Times is also available online, but they seem to make it very hard to construct permanent links (Murdoch does love a paywall) - some people do sem toknow how to do it, and if you can work out how, it actually seems to be free! The gazette template is in use in tens (if not hundreds) of milhist featured articles, and I'm not aware of any objections to it having been made at any time. Incidentally there is a free, though not yet complete, alternative for English and Welsh births, marriages, and deaths data, http://www.freebmd.org.uk. David Underdown (talk) 17:48, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

thanks for that link. I've bookmarked it. I'll leave the gazette things alone, but if it becomes a question of making all the sources into templates, those templates are going. I hate the templates. They have no flexibility. I've dedabbed it, etc., and put it up for GA. auntieruth (talk) 17:57, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

I think because it's a single-source template, there haven't been too many problems mixing it with either cite/citation templates when they have been used on the one hand, and otherwise hand-formatted templates on the other. But if consensus goes against them, that's the way it goes. For me they do help offer a bit of what I'd see as rigour, rather than inflexibility, and offer potential for re-use of data as it makes the information more readily identifiable as metadata. Though the main thing for this type of source is the maintenance aspect, tracking down and fixing hundreds of instances of a source is deeply dull at the best of times, andwhen you knwo there's a simpler way... David Underdown (talk) 19:31, 16 June 2010 (UTC)