Template talk:Country study

This template was considered for deletion on 2016 January 7. The result of the discussion was "keep".

This template was considered for deletion on 2010 August 20. The result of the discussion was "keep".

The LOC has changed the URLs to the country studies. Instead using the country code, there's now an ID. For example, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/cntrystd.cy (Cyprus) is now located at https://www.loc.gov/item/92036090/. All the country studies can be found at https://www.loc.gov/collections/country-studies/. Someone will either need to manually update this template and the pages where they are transcluded, or have a bot do it. Thanks. —howcheng {chat} 20:50, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Please provide the option to use this inline (the same way as e.g. {{EB1911}}) to change the text "This article incorporates ..." to "One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates ..." – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 09:35, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Finnusertop: Are you thinking of using this template as an inline reference, or within the article text itself? When |pd=no, then there is no "This article incorporates", so |inline= would do nothing and this template invokes {{cite web}}. Is that right?

@Trappist the monk: For the |pd=yes case, we can modify {{Include-USGov}} to accept |inline=. Would you like to do that, or should I? —hike395 (talk) 12:44, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've actually been wondering why |inline= is necessary. en.wiki is a wiki. That seems an obvious statement but it means that anyone can change anything at anytime and that they will. So, if this template is used 'inline', for a while its declaration will be true. But, someone will change something at sometime and the template's declaration will not be true. This all leads me to think that an attribution at the bottom of the article that reads:

'This article has incorporated ...'

or:

'A previous version of this article incorporated ...'

or some-such-other declaration might be better.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:12, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk: Inline citations for public domain sources is important to avoid plagiarism. As an example, see Rocky Mountains, where every paragraph that was sourced from the USGS article by Stohlgren is marked with an inline citation that has a PD incorporation notice.

Now, you make a good point that articles evolve. That has happened to Rocky Mountains, where some of the paragraphs have been expanded. I agree with you that saying "one or more of the preceeding sentences" may be too specific. What I've done with PD templates based on {{Include-USGov}} is simply use the "This article incorporates" as part of the inline citation. That way, we avoid both plagiarism and the problem that you mention.

My conclusion is that you're right, we don't need an |inline= parameter, but we should still keep using the current wording with inline references. —hike395 (talk) 12:44, 11 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Missing a parameter for edition. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 00:23, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Nope (I added |edition=6th to this that I got from the doc page – completely bogus):

{{Country study|country= Comoros|abbr=km|author=Vincent Ercolano|section=Transportation and Telecommunications|date=1994|editor=Helen Chapin Metz |edition=6th}}

This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Vincent Ercolano (1994). Helen Chapin Metz (ed.). Comoros: A Country Study (6th ed.). Federal Research Division. Transportation and Telecommunications.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:30, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, Trappist the monk. It seems to support all the CS1 parameters (|ref= was next on my list, but that works as well), which is great. I was fooled by the doc page; it should list all the supported parameters. Can you look into the inline issue in the section above? With that fixed, this I this template could be used far more efficiently without any awkward hacks. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 00:45, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This template accepts all of the parameters that {{cite web}} accepts. I'll think on the inline thing tomorrow.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:47, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk: à propos cite web, why do we use it when the country studies are all books? A well formatted citation with this template looks something like this:

This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Keefe, Eugene K.; Solsten, Eric (1993). Solsten, Eric (ed.). Cyprus: A Country Study (Fourth ed.). Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. Historical Setting. ISBN 0-8444-0752-6.

Because it's essentially cite web, it awkwardly crams the contributors and editor(s) together, obscuring who did what. It doesn't italicize the title although it's a book. Because the section parameter is an alias for at, it displays it at the end and won't let me use a page parameter with it.

With cite book, I'd use something like this:

Keefe, Eugene K.; Solsten, Eric (1993). "Historical Setting". In Solsten, Eric (ed.). Cyprus: A Country Study (Fourth ed.). Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. p. 1. ISBN 0-8444-0752-6.

That makes more sense, no? – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:20, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Don't you think that this question should be directed to Editor Hike395 who was the editor who chose to use {{cite web}} with this edit? My part in all of this was to allow the use of all of the available template parameters via Module:Template wrapper. If you want to convert to {{cite book}} and can gain consensus to do so, I have no part to play there.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:33, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

 Done Conversion to {{cite book}} was easy, so I went ahead and did it. —hike395 (talk) 00:25, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

1. In edit comments for Template:Loc/doc, Calliopejen1 suggested that {{cite encyclopedia}} was superior to this template, because it matched the reality of the source better. I'm perfectly happy to change the use of {{cite book}} in this template to {{cite encyclopedia}}, if other editors agree.

1. In their recent edit, Calliopejen1 removed {{Include-USGov}} because they thought that it wasn't appropriate for inline citation, and used {{PD-notice}} instead. {{Include-USGov}} is used in many templates for inline citation. For consistency with other Federal Government citation templates, I'd like to restore the use of {{Include-USGov}}. Thoughts? — hike395 (talk) 15:18, 29 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A couple comments: Long term, I'm not sure what the benefit of using {{country study}} is over just having editors use normal citation templates. The country studies are all encyclopedias in the sense that they are edited volumes of chapters by other authors. So migrating to {{cite encyclopedia}} is good in the sense that it's an improvement over {{cite book}} but long term I think it makes more sense for people to just use {{cite encyclopedia}} (or {{cite book}} directly rather than kludgy wrappers where it isn't obvious that the full range of parameters can be used -- assuming this is even possible? even I, as a superuser, am not sure). I was the original creator of this template (and probably the one who has placed the template the most? not sure), and it was designed with its current layout for a reason -- so it could be used appropriately in footnotes. When you go to a footnote, you expect to see the source of the statement, normally formatted, first. It makes sense that the licensing/PD statement comes next. {{Include-USGov}} was originally for a generic attribution at the bottom of the article, and it's formatted the way it is for that reason. It is not appropriate to convert this footnote template to be in the format of a generic attribution template. Perhaps there could be a broader discussion about converting {{Include-USGov}} to a normal footnote format (I started that discussion recently and removed it before anyone commented because I wasn't up to give it the attention it deserved). But I don't think we need to make this template worse for the sake of consistency. I was not aware that it had been changed to {{Include-USGov}} back in 2016, and I would have objected at that point had I become aware. Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:02, 29 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As an example of why this template should be just be replaced by {{cite encyclopedia}} or {{cite book}}, I just went to edit one usage in Visual Editor, and there is no field for page number (these are all physical books as well). So I couldn't easily add a page number and just abandoned my effort. Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:08, 29 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• The reason why the template didn't work in Visual Editor is because it needs TemplateData. I can fix that easily.
• I think all of the government-attribution templates are useful for the following reasons:
  1. They automatically put PD attribution notices into the article. Otherwise, editors might not realize they are necessary.
  2. The URL is stored in one place, so that if it becomes invalid, we can fix it once and it propagates to all articles. Otherwise, we have to use bots to cleanup the broken URLs. This happens pretty often.
  3. They add tracking categories to the articles, to help editors keep track of the attributions
  4. If they all call {{Include-USGov}}, we can fix the formatting once, instead of having inconsistent formatting between templates.
• I'm quite happy to consider overhauling the formatting of {{Include-USGov}} to make it look nicer within an inline citation. It's not so nice now.

I'm a bit busy IRL, but happy to work on this over the next couple of weeks. — hike395 (talk) 08:37, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Hike395: Could you edit {{Include-USGov}} so it has a parameter that causes the reference to be formatted like this one? That is, bibliographic info via cite book/encyclopedia/whatever, then {{PD-notice}} in the postscript field? I think that would be the best of all worlds. That way the footnotes generated by {{Include-USGov}} could be formatted like normal footnotes, if they are being used as footnotes and the editor selects that display format. Unfortunately, my template abilities are no longer good enough to do an edit like that.... Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:02, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Or another route would be to develop good citations for each country and store them all inside the {{country study}} template. I'm starting to assemble them here as part of my cleanup effort for {{loc}}. We also could conceivably combine this sort of approach with the {{Include-USGov}} template edits, but I'm not sure that calling {{Include-USGov}} would be that helpful if we're storing the complete citations... Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:04, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Calliopejen1: Excellent suggestion. I am thinking of adding a switch to {{Include-USGov}} to make it look more like other inline citations. — hike395 (talk) 22:42, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've recently added a page for Helen Chapin Metz and have been linking her as editor where one of her country studies is cited. I've not changed the test cases on this page as they're, well, test cases :) Dsp13 (talk) 08:28, 22 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]