References
Mary Sue Ittner (Wed, 19 Nov 2003 07:26:47 PST)
Dear All,
I'm finally having a moment to respond to Jane's post. I think if she is
willing to do a Reference page for us it would be a good addition to the
wiki. I'd link it to the home page. I think we could do it in stages. First
would be to have a list of references. Later we could link them to the wiki
pages. And I agree with Arnold that when we add the links that having
volunteers to help would make the process go a lot faster. If no volunteers
come forward, then I anticipate genus pages would get linked to references
only if someone was especially interested in that genus. That is the nature
of the wiki and why some pages have more information and pictures on them
than others.
For now please send the information about your best reference books to
Jane: janemcgary at earthlink.net. I include below the information she has
suggested. A lot of us have many bulb books. I certainly do. But I find
that some I refer to often and others rarely. Let's start with those books
we really use. For the most part I agree with her recommendations to stick
to books, but it seems useful to include current revisions of a genus even
if it is a journal article. I am thinking of the revision of Ferraria and
Romulea for example that were done within the last few years. Could there
be an exception for those? This is where you probably will find the latest
information about names.
If we limit the references to books (no journal articles) the size should
remain manageable. The basic information needed is author(s) with FULL
NAMES, please (not just initials, you scientists), date of publication,
and full title (including subtitle). It also helps to have the publisher's
name, because some books are published by different presses in different
countries (known as copublication; typical example is Timber Press in the
USA and Batsford in the UK) and the ISBN number, which is a quick way to
order a book. All this information can normally be found on the reverse of
the title page.
Once references start to come in I think Jane could start to add them to
the wiki which would save a lot of us having to send information for the
same book. If she already had it listed, then you wouldn't have to send it
again.
And although I really like the brief annotation idea, since this will be in
the public domain should we be careful about what we write? For example
might it be better just to say "Useful for color photos" instead of
"Riddled with errors, but useful for color photos." I know we are eager to
expose some of the books that drive us crazy, but would there be a
liability issue?
I see what Boyce means when he says we could use whatever words we wanted
to in a link, but if our page of references got to be long, it would seem
that the easiest way to find the reference on the page would be searching
for whatever first word Jane uses. If she makes it alphabetical by author
then you'd want to list the author in the link. If she arranges it by
title, then a title. Otherwise you'd have to scan the whole page. But you
could solve the dilemma of which reference of an author by referring to the
book in the link as well.
eg. (Manning, Goldlatt, and Snijman's Color Encyclopedia)
Mary Sue
PBS List Administrator, Wiki Worker, TOW Coordinator (Whew!)