CZ Talk:Direct referencing

References with problematic identifiers

I really do like this idea, but I'm not sure how it might be applied to source material that may not have a consistent identifier system. Pre-ISBN books are one example.

Government documents can be another problem, sometimes because for one reason or another, the document identifier system keeps changing, often for no really good reason. For example, there is a class of formal U.S. presidential rulings, in the national security area, that each recent president seems to want to call something different. Really, National Security Action Memoranda and Presidential Directives and National Security Decision Directives are essentially the same document, but with a different name and sequence system in each Administration. Within an Administration, however,the numbering is consistent.

There's also the challenge of referring to historic documents that were done by authors that had no concept of an identifier system, but now are conveniently available as scans on websites. See the notes on Ho Chi Minh, for example, where there are references to Politburo documents. Howard C. Berkowitz 13:02, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

What I had in mind when starting "Direct referencing" is basically whether or not to have the long tail of numbered references on the bottom of an article's page or on separate pages (one for each reference), human-readably referenced directly in the text (e.g. as Stringer et al., 2008). The point you address is certainly valid but it concerns the naming of these individual reference pages, not their existence as such. Indeed, as already mentioned on my talk page, the identifier-based pages do not necessarily bear human-readable names at all (e.g. CZ:Ref:DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0001683), though I have come to make regular use of human-readable shortcuts composed as CZ:Ref:FirstAuthorsLastName_Year_Title_of_the_item_as_it_appears_on_the_cover_page (i.e. CZ:Ref:Stringer 2008 Effectiveness of Journal Ranking Schemes as a Tool for Locating Information). Such a system may also be helpful in cases where no unique identifier is available, as with CZ:Ref:Mountcastle 1957 Modality and Topographic Properties of Single Neurons of Cat's Somatic Sensory Cortex. Besides, the system I am testing here is meant to improve on the current referencing system by taking advantage of consistent identifiers when available. If no consistent identifier is available, then this new system won't work any better than the current one but given that the availability of DOI, ISBN etc. is on the rise, my hunch is that it may well do so in many cases, if adopted by others. Further discussion, perhaps, fits better into the technical forum. Daniel Mietchen 13:36, 26 January 2009 (UTC)