References

You can use a short abbreviation of any part of the bibliography to link back to the full citation. In your example there is no reason why Color Encyc. Cape Bulbs couldn't be the link.

Boyce Tankersley
btankers@chicagobotanic.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Mary Sue Ittner [mailto:msittner@mcn.org]
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 12:34 PM
To: Pacific Bulb Society
Subject: Re: [pbs] References

Hi All and especially Jane,

I was wondering whether we needed to put the references on the wiki pages
in the same way. Usually bibliographies start with the author, but listing
them that way in a sentence seems awkward. I think the Color Encyclopedia
of Cape Bulbs will be an excellent resource for so many of the Cape Bulbs.
But if I add it as Manning, John, Peter Goldblatt and Dee Snijman, The
Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs (Portland, Timber Press, 2002)and a
description it just doesn't seem to read very well. I started thinking what
a pain it would be to have to enter that information for all the South
African genera we already have wiki pages for.

Then it occurred to me that we could use the wiki for Jane's project. It
wouldn't be nearly as sophisticated as what she planned, but perhaps it
would be a start. On the main wiki page we could create a bibliography of
reference books. Then on the genus pages we could link to the bibliography
using a code for whatever book we are referencing. We'd have to come up
with a shorthand for each book so people could quickly find it if they
wished to know all the details. I suppose we could use a numbering system,
but then the books wouldn't be alphabetical. So I'd suggest author and date
as Jane initially proposed as a possibility and hope that some of the more
prolific writers haven't published a lot in the same year, at least not
major works like we would be adding.

How I would envision this would be adding a sentence for the reference to
each genus page it applied to. So in using my example above, I could paste
the sentence below on all the appropriate genera for the Cape:
References on the Cape Floral province species can be found in Manning et.
al. (2002). I'd enter the author and date like this: [Manning et.al.
(2002) | url for wiki references page]
That would link the specific reference to the wiki page where the full
details could be found. Obviously not everyone would be able to figure out
how to do this, but if Jane would volunteer to help those people who had
information, but didn't want to add it, since this was her original idea, I
think it might work. In the long run it would save time and make the wiki
pages easier to read for most of the people who won't care about
references, but still would give them for those who did care.

And since the question of books always comes up with people who are new to
the subject we'd be creating a general list at the same time.

What does everyone think of this idea?

Mary Sue

PBS List Administrator, Wiki Worker, TOW Coordinator (Whew!)

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