Using free space pages for sources, with HTML tags not recommended?

Question

Some folks are using free space pages for sources.  In order to do this, they use a style of citation not mentioned in the Style Guide http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Sources_Style_Guide .

The citation style used originally was our typical: <ref name="Mead">Mead, Spencer P., [https://archive.org/stream/historyandgenea00meadgoog#page/n357/mode/2up ''History and Genealogy of the Mead Family of Fairfield County, Connecticut, Eastern New York, Western Vermont, and Western Pennsylvania, from A.D. 1180 to 1900.''] (Page 300) New York: Knickerbocker, 1901, OpenLibrary.org accessed November 21, 2014</ref>

This is an example of the edited replacement:

within the biography <ref>[[#S1|Mead]]</ref> 

and under the Sources section <span id='S1'></span>Mead, Spencer P. <i>[[Space:History and Genealogy of the Mead Family of Fairfield County, Connecticut|History and Genealogy of the Mead Family of Fairfield County, Connecticut]]</i> (New York, Knickerbocker Press, 1901)  

It uses some of the HTML tags which are not on the recommended page.

The </i> tag is not on the recommended page.

The <span id='S1'> and </span> tags are mentioned as "used to create an anchor for a link" but then are not included on the "Adding Links" page  http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Adding_links

In addition to these, some concerns:  Some of the free space sources do not contain links (I like links).  If it does have a link on the free space page, it takes at least three clicks (as opposed to one) to reach the online publication.

The free space does not allow for a date accessed.  I always use this when doing major editing or merging, to show that I have actually looked at the linked citations.

We have inconsistency in citation styles, if some people are using one method and others are using a different method.

The freespace citation syntax is more complicated than even the recommended long style citations.

One free space page per publication cited. (can only imagine how many free space pages would be created if everyone used one per citation!)

Does this place some sort of burden on the system?  (don't know the language to explain this)

Anyone else who has thoughts or concerns ...  thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Hi Cynthia

 

I use a similar way of sourcing.  I thought it a good idea because you only need type the source info once, and all profiles using it automatically update if you change the free space page.  What cinched it was G2G question Blurring the line between Categories and Free-Space Profiles. Adding this code [[Special:Whatlinkshere/Space:mypagename|Pages that link here]] to the free space lists all the profiles using that source, which I think is a great idea.

 

Access Date: I agree it's important to record the access date so I put the date of access in the free space page.  It doesn't update tho, so recently I've been thinking of removing the access date from the free space pages I manage and adding them in the bio.

 

I've also started using this method when citing different pages in the same book.  

 

In some respects I think it makes reading the edit page easier because all of the main source details are in the Sources section.

 

I like links to the page in the book as well.  So I do it like this (the link is not to Mead):

 

in the Bio:

• <ref name=MeadP10>[[#Mead|Mead 1878]], [https://archive.org/stream/visitationsofess1314metc#page/10/mode/2up p. 10]</ref> 
• <ref name=MeadP39>[[#Mead|Mead 1878]], [https://archive.org/stream/visitationsofess1314metc#page/39/mode/2up p. 39]</ref>

Under See also:

• <span id='Mead'></span> then the free space details or just the full details of the source with the date accessed.

It looks like this:

 

1. ↑1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Mead 1878, p. 10
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Mead 1878, p. 39

 

See also:

• Mead ...

Clicking on Mead 1878 jumps to the full source details under "See also:". I usually include a link here to the title page of the book, although lately I've thought a link to the appropriate index page would be better.

 

Clicking on a page link, eg p. 10, opens that page in the book.

 

I'd like to see it discussed and best practice added to the Sources Style Guide.

Answer 2

(PS didn't see Maryann's post before posting)

Several separate issues here.

1.  The use of span tags to create internal anchors is supported.  It's useful for many purposes, especially within long free space pages.  The anchors can also be used by links from outside, eg you could have a shortcut to http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Carolingian-77#hobbies on your desktop, if you felt the need for fast access to the section on his hobbies.

2.  The use of # within double square brackets is an obvious extension that works as expected, ie [[Wikipedia:Charlemagne#References]] and [[Carolingian-77#hobbies]] are just WikiCode conveniences which translate into the URLs you'd expect them to.  The use of [[# meaning "current page" follows normal HTML convention.  I have no idea where this is documented.

3. Using these facilities to create jump links from footnotes to sources is a nicety that is never necessary and is overkill most of the time.

It tends to encourage a bad habit - the temptation is to write [[#S4|ibid]]., p. 376.  But this is useless to somebody who takes a printout to the library, because they won't know which ibid relates to what.  In general, there should be enough textual information for pages to make sense without links.

4. But there's no connection between linking-footnotes-to-sources and the use of free space wrappers, beyond the fact that this is where people are getting the idea from.  In fact the linking scheme is more useful when free space wrappers are not used.

On the whole I'm not keen on giving full catalogue entries for books in footnotes - I'd rather keep footnotes short and sweet and punt the full publication data to a separate section.

But free space wrappers take care of that anyway.  They encourage a style where the footnote just says "Plodsbury Genealogy, p. 794", with "Plodsbury Genealogy" being a link to the wrapper. (The page number can also be a link if the book is viewable online)

Then there needn't be any more clutter on the profile at all.  I don't see a need for books referred to in this way to also be listed under a Sources header.

 

 

Comments

And for another viewpoint: I prefer to see what I need to know about a source-- i.e., a full citation-- on one page, without having to click to another page for the full author, title, publishing date, etc.

A profile without this seems incomplete to me. A profile with it doesn't look cluttered, but well sourced. (I will concur that repeated listings of the same source over and over DOES look cluttered...)

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I have to agree with Jillaine, without the full source citation it just makes it harder for others to check your sources and that is not good practice.  I never use the <span></span> tags because for what I do everything can be done with <ref></ref> and using both would only add to the confusion for anyone who would try to edit the page later, not everyone understands the HTML codes so I try to keep it as simple as possible for everyone;s benifet.

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I agree with both of you, Jillaine and Dale.  Thank you for weighing in on this topic.

I understand folks wanting to be able to track their citations and short-cut the process, but Wikitree was not designed with free space pages as source-holders.  Using this as a work-around only adds complexity and inconsistency.

My thought is that none of us "own" the open profiles, so we really ought to either folow the Style Guide or lobby to have it changed.

Answer 3

I see two separate issues to consider.

How should we format citations on Wikitree?

Rick Pierpont set up most source pages and I've followed his lead for how to format the examples. The citation format used resembles the "short form" citation format used in Wikipedia.  Wikipedia also recognizes the long form.  Why not avoid redundant effort and follow the Wikipedia style guide (with some modifications for our tags)?  I haven't seen any consensus from us on MLA, AP, APA, Evidence Explained. I gather that the prevailing sentiment is any citation is better than none.   

I have no strong preference for a particular citation style, but I do think it's valuable to link to Source pages in our citations.  That link is an asset if you want to use it and surely unobtrusive to those who don't.  



Why would we want to use Source pages?


1. Linked data and metadata


We want to refer to Source pages for the same reason we want to see people categorized by location.  I'm confident this database will evolve to the point where it's easy to combine and sort categories, profiles, and free space pages by the way they've been tagged.


2. Referrals to other profiles that have cited a work


It's kind of like a Google Scholar for genealogy books.  How many times was this book used by other Wikitreers and where?  It's probably worth checking out those profiles and seeing how they treated the source.  For example, see the What Links Here page for this colorful title.

3. Background information on the work

Warnings, discussions, or advice for other researchers thinking of using the work, corrected info, links to sources or websites that talk about it.  I just read that The History and Genealogy of Fenwick's Colony was to be treated cautiously.  I added a comment to the Source page.  I will review profiles where I've cited this work and inject skepticism if any information is unsubstantiated.  


4. Keeping organized


I am taking notes from a book that covers multiple intermarrying family groups.  It will take me time to spread the information among them.  By linking the profile to the Source, I can see who's been worked on already and find other profiles referencing the same work.  If you've added any Sources yourself or joined the watchlist of one, you can click "Restrict to Watchlist" and see "your" booklist.
  And on almost every Source page, there's a dummy citation you can copy, paste and add page numbers to.

5. Centralized links


--You can link to all possible access points for an item--AmericanAncestors.org, FamilySearch, Ancestry, archive.org, Google Books, Worldcat--as a kindness to others who want to use a source.  For a multi-volume set, you have one page to include links to each separate volume.  



--Links change and better databases/better scans come up from time to time.  You can manage those changes in one location instead of having to update every citation.


Maybe something else will emerge...

These goals are interesting to me, but I won't mind if the format for attaining these goals changes.  Perhaps we will have an enhancement we can use to pull bibliographic data from a third party (LibraryThing, Worldcat, WeRelate, etc), while allowing us to modify the metadata or the catalog entry.  Maybe we'll partner with another group who's doing this already.  While I can come up with other methods for tracking genealogy sources, none has all the assets of this one.  It would be great to see more of us using them and I am happy to help getting started if anyone is interested.

I'm grateful for your scholarship.

Thank you for reading,

Heather

Comments

If I were to go do research on location I would prefer to keep what I take with me to a minimum so that I could maximize the space for what I would find so by putting the "long" format on the profile pages I could just take printouts of the people that I am researching and not have to worry about taking my computer and finding an internet connection.  With the "short" format and linking to other pages I would then need a computer and internet connection to check the work.  I vote to keep it simple and just use the complete citation on every profile.

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I would like to add some comments to Heather's excellent list. 

 

The use of <span id> and S-Numbers came from the WikiTree GEDCOM import. There are thousands of new profiles being created each day using this method. It also does a great job of keeping the source information out of the Biography section (putting it in the == Sources == section). Source information should be as complete as possible, and intermingling this information with the biography information makes everything more difficult to read and edit.

 

Using Free-Space profiles for sources is the only way I know to collaborate on sources using WikiTree. Some of these Free-Space profiles contain a lot of information, much more information than you would want to include as a source in a profile.

 

This method includes all 'normal' source information (author, title, publisher, etc.), plus it adds internal and external links. I have heard complaints from people that don't link external links and complaints that I should include external links. Providing both internal (Free-Space profile) and external (html source page) links solves both problems. The external link provides easy and quick access to the information. If the external link becomes broken some day, the internal link will always lead you to the correct information.

 

These Free-Space profiles solve the problem of what to say about the repository. Most sources can be found at multiple locations. Some free and some for a fee. If you use a paid service, that is great, but I would rather know about the free location. Also, Google Books and archive.org provide two different types of interfaces for accessing books. Some people prefer one over the other. Providing both lets people choose. Sometimes, these different services offer multiple copies of the same book. This is important when the quality of a scan or OCR is poor.

 

These Free-Space profiles can be labeled with dates, location, and surname. The Free-Space profiles will show up when doing a surname search. Dates and location are not used now, but maybe someday.

 

Another advantage of these free-space profiles is that they can be grouped/organized, creating a library of material. I hope this is used by people to discover sources that they can use for their own research. See the page http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Source

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I have not yet used a Free Space page for a Source, but I just learned something in this discussion that makes its use attractive.  That is the ability to do a "What Links Here" search.  That facility is very attractive. Maybe if we all used Categories extensively, we would have other ways of searching for profiles involved in a particular place or activity, and probably the people who use Free Space pages are also the ones who use Categories extensively, but i do see it as a useful tool.

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I tried to use Categories for sources, but I had too many problems with the way Wikitree implements Categories. I outlined the problems in another G2G post: http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/136321/detailed-view-on-a-category-page

Maybe a combination of Categories and Free-Space profiles could be implemented, to help organize sources.

Answer 4

I see all kinds of great and wonderful comments and answers here - too many to try to thank y'll individually - so I'm just going to say I like everything I've seen here and hope y'all will forgive me for not mentioning everyone by name!!!

I am not going to address anything about the correct genealogical aspects of citing sources - please understand that the ONLY thing I'm going to talk about is the techy end of HOW to do things - if these things are not academically correct, that's for you to figure out - sorry, but I don't know much about this end of it.

OK - I'm ready to dig into all this with some suggestions about how the sources can be coded.  This will apply to two different situations - (1) when different pages (or places) in the same document are being cited in one profile and (2) when multiple profiles will cite the same document.

1.  If you have a profile that states a fact that is supported by what is on page 4 of TheDocument and also states a fact that is supported by what is on page 17 of TheDocument and maybe also states a fact that is supported by what is on page 83 of TheDocument, if you want it to look like:

Biography
This is the story of the life of John Doe, who was born January 1, 1900(superscript 1 here).  John liked to play with toy airplanes when he was a child.(superscript 2 here).  When Joh grew up, he became a pilot and flew planes.(superscript 3 here).

Sources
1. TheDocument, page 4
2. TheDocument, page 17
3. TheDocument, page 83

* TheDocument, by Jane Doe, FlyByNight Publisher, January 1, 2000, (accessed January 2, 2000).     (or whatever the source citation should look like - that's not my bag)
 

When you click on any of the superscript numbers in the biography, you will jump to the footnote under Sources.  When you click on the link to MyDocument in any of the numbered footnotes, you will jump to the bullet item that has the full citation of the document.

Here is what the editing page would like like:

==Biography==
This is the story of the life of John Doe, who was born January 1, 1900.<ref name="page4">
[[#document1|TheDocument]], page 4.
</ref>
 John liked to play with toy airplanes when he was a child.<ref name="page 17">[[#document2|TheDocument]], page 17.
</ref>
When John grew up he became a pilot and flew planes.<ref name="page83">
[[#document3|TheDocument}}, page 83.
</ref>

==Sources==
<references />

* TheDocument, by Jane Doe, FlyByNight Publisher, January 1, 2000, (accessed January 2, 2000).

Please note that I gave each <ref> tag a name attribute.  That is not necessary - I just like to do it all the time because it makes it easy for me to identify what the source is just by looking at the name of the tag plus if I refer to the same source multiple times in the biography, I can use the <ref name="something"> tag the first time, with all the information about the source, ending with </ref> and for each subsequent time I only have to use the same name in a single tag of <ref name="something" />.

This is getting long, so I will write a comment after it to present how to do it using Space pages.

Comments

I forgot to mention in the above example, if TheDocument is available online someplace then you can make the bulleted item where you give all the information about the document link to the location as follows:

* [http://www.wherever.com MyDocument], by Jane Doe, etc.

OK - now for how to do it using a free space page.  There are two ways to use the free space page.

1.  If you want to put the entire source document in the free space page, then put bookmarks at whatever locations in the material you are going to want to refer to:

<span id="start"> </span>Document Title
You can start by listing all the citation information about the document - author, date, etc.  After that the document content starts and it continues on and on.

<span id="place1"> </span>This is the starting point of a fact that you will want to cite from 1 or more profiles.  The document goes on and on from here until it reaches

<span id="place2"> </span>the point where another fact you want to cite is stated.

In a profile's biography, when you want to cite the document that is in the free space page, your tag would look like:

<ref name="mytagname">
[http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:MySpace#place1 Document Title], John's birth certificate information.
</ref>

Note that this uses a single bracket because it is an external link.  You use a space instead of a pipe ("|") characater to separate the link from the hot text.

2. If you want to put the citations for several different documents in a single free space page in order to reference any of the documents from many profiles, this is what the free space's editing page will look like:

==Sources for the Battles of the Revolutionary War==

<span name="battle1"> </span>
* [http://www.whatever.com The First Battle], AuthorName, Publisher, PublicationDate, ..... (whatever you want to put in the citation)

<span name="battle2"> </span>
* [http://www.whatever.com The Second Battle],. AuthorName, Publisher, PublicationDate, ... (whatever you want to put in the citation).

In a profile, where you want to cite one of these documents, you would put:

This is a fact.<ref name="battle1">
[http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:MySpacePage#battle1 The First Battle], page x.
</ref>

Note that you can include a page number if you know it.

OK - I'm done - any questions?

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Great write up Gaile, I like it.

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Gaile,

Not a question as you explained it well but the original question was should we be doing this because it uses HTML code that is not recommended.  Also my biggest concern to linking to freespace pages is that I would have to cary my computer and wireless WiFi router with me when on a research field trip and not just printouts to have all of the source information available to me.

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The Free-Space profile does not replace any information that you would normally put in a citation on a profile, so there would be no need to carry extra equipment. This method still requires a citation that includes the same information as before. The Free-Space profile allows for collaboration on sources and it supports extra information that you would not put in a citation.

 

It also does not use HTML code that is not recommended. It only uses HTML code that is used by WikiTree to generate thousands of new profiles every day. The one item pointed out above is not required and is slowly being removed from existing Free-Space profiles.

 

This method is certainly more technical. There are easier ways of documenting sources, but this way takes advantage of working in a wiki environment. I think one way to encourage people to add sources, is to offer different ways to add sources, both simple and more technical.

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Dale,

I made a disclaimer about knowing what is/is not "recommended" (because I am not able to make sense out of all the disorganized and conflicting information on help pages and what they link to) as well as what is/is not academically correct (because of my lack of research skills),  For this reason, I will not address the "should we be doing this" part of your comment, other than to bristle at this being called HTML - it is a bunch of hocus-pocus that attempts to imitate html's use of the anchor tag but is called "wikicode".

Rick,

Dale makes a very good point about the impact of this style of source inclusion on his work habits.  He said he prints out profiles to take with him instead of carrying his computer and a wi-fi router.  If the source information is on free space pages, then the profiles he prints and takes with him would be missing that information.  He does have a solution, but a time consuming one - he could look at all the profiles he is printing and print whatever free space pages they link to as well.

Of course, by the time he's done, he'll probably end up carrying more weight in paper than carrying a tablet, plus it would be much faster to access electronically than by shuffling through reams of paper..

.

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Gail, I tried to point out in my previous post that this would not impact Dale's work habits. It still requires an accurate and complete source citation in the profile. His profile printouts would still have everything he needs.

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Gaile and Rick,

I check out almost every post to G2G almost every day and I can tell you that there are members on here that range form very advanced programmers to those who can only figure out how to get on here and enter data.  If the advanced people keep pushing for using the elaborate stuff, by any name, and use extra links to other pages that are not needed if all of the important information is cited on the profile we could lose them to other sites and that could have a negative impact here.  And Rick I actually do cary my computer and wireless WiFi hotspot with me most of the time but others may not have the ability to do so and as Gaile points out the extra printouts could cost, not only in extra weight and time, but also in extra cost of paper and ink.  Another advantage to having everything in one place is when showing others who are not members here what has been found, like at reunions, it is much simpler to show them a printout and not have to set the computer up and go back and forth between pages trying to explain how this all works in one shot.

So even with the method used by Rick the only thing I can see by that method is duplicating the information in other locations.

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Rick I also noticed that your example of using freespace pages is showing you the Catagories pages and not a freespace page for sources.  I do sometimes place a profile in a catagory but not very often because I spend most of my time finding sources for unsourced profiles and have never been that interested in learning about the catagories.