CZ Talk:History Workgroup/Style Guide

Probably should move some of the discussion here

Come the revolution, or whatever, and there's an active Editorial Council, we can look for general solutions. I don't disagree, Russell, that you've defined a use for Debate Guide, but, if you hadn't explained it, I wouldn't have thought of that application. Instead, I would have assumed it was a guide for educators assigning debates, which may or may not be a likely CZ audience given the Charter draft assumptions about audience. With Larry's K-12 interests, I suspect some of the subpages are meant to serve that audience.

If you'll look at Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain/Bibliography, do you think the the Radcliffe entry should belongs there. The way you've described "works" comes closest, except this is a pointer to an collection of manuscripts from the family. I still think we are being too nuanced among bibliography, external links, works, etc. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:58, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

My advice is that it's probably a good idea to note where his papers can be found, so keep it. I've added a line about archives to the style guide. Russell D. Jones

Reference style

We are going to differ a bit, Russell, in that I do not consider any discipline's bibliographic citation style something to be followed in lockstep. In particular, the place of publication is an anachronism, but the ISBN is not. If I tried to send a message to "Little Brown, New York", I doubt it would get there. For some of the books I've written, the major publishers involved had multiple "official" locations.

We are also going to have to face the issue, at some point, of conflict between the styles of different disciplines, carefully avoiding the term "workgroup". Let's say there is a history of biochemically based psychology: one could make arguments for Chicago Manual of Style (History), American Psychological Association, National Library of Medicine, or Chemical Abstracts. An ideal, I think, would be to have the presentation be user selectable, as programs such as EndNote do. That way, the author can put in the bibliographic style that's most familiar, but the user also has that choice. Howard C. Berkowitz 00:54, 17 June 2010 (UTC)