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Template:Infobox book is permanently
protected from editing because it is a
heavily used or highly visible template. Substantial changes should first be proposed and discussed here on this page. If the proposal is uncontroversial or has been discussed and is supported by
consensus, editors may use {{
edit template-protected}} to notify an administrator or template editor to make the requested edit. Usually, any contributor may edit the template's
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This page has archives. Sections older than 90 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III. |
Category:Pages to import images to Wikidata, which is populated by this template, has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you.
I would like to propose a change here to change the |country=
parameter to |location=
or |pub_location=
to clear up confusion and match the usage in {{
Cite book}}. In my wide experience of observing and editing book articles, there is a constant confusion and misuse of this parameter. Using |country=
to mean country of original publication is confusing as books, nearly without exception, are published in specific locations. Usually a city, the city where the publisher is based. The standalone city name, not country, is THE standard in publishing. But |country=
is endlessly used for the writer's nationality. Typically, the author's country of origin is indeed the country where their given book was published. However, that is not always the case. {{
Infobox book}} favors the 1st edition publication of a book. First editions are periodically published first in countries that differ from the author's nationality or citizenships. Especially in today's globalized world. A book by an Indian-born writer first published in New York by Simon & Schuster should not have India in the country parameter. And yet, I cannot count how many these instances I have come across. This trend only seems to be getting worse. |location=
, but especially |pub_location=
, removes confusion here and more clearly states what that parameter is for.
Οἶδα (
talk)
19:04, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
|country=
is indeed confusing, and for novels it often gets used for the country or countries in which the action takes place (should be |set_in=
). I may have been guilty of that myself once or twice - oops. |pub_location=
would be much clearer on all counts. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MichaelMaggs (
talk •
contribs)
19:52, 14 February 2023 (UTC)|publication-place=
(and synonymously, |place=
or |location=
) and defines it as "The city of publication. If more than one town/city is listed on the title page, give the first one or the location of the publisher's head office." Do we still want to refer to the country (not the city) of publication, and if so, should we draw a distinction in naming the default parameter? (|publication-country=
?)
TheFeds
19:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
|pub_place=
or |pub_location=
, and |pub_country=
should suffice. We already make the distinction for Date (|pub_date=
). These should follow.
Οἶδα (
talk)
20:55, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
<br />
-separated list.)city, country
doesn't seem unreasonable when necessary or desirable.|country=<!--of original publication-->
to the copyable template example on the documentation page. This would induce a particular usage in new instances. More complex ones could involve manual or automated review via the bot process.
TheFeds
00:31, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
city, country
. Any change that would accommodate this standard in publishing is preferable. And I agree with changing the documentation page, which I predict is a particularly non-controversial change.
Οἶδα (
talk)
21:28, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
Would be helpful to revive this discussion because it has not aged out of relevance. Οἶδα ( talk) 12:17, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
|pub_place=
parameter than replacing |country=
at this point. Sorry if the section header is now confusing.
Οἶδα (
talk)
22:39, 28 February 2024 (UTC)|pub_location=
as an alias of |country=
would work from a technical standpoint. That would allow |country=
to continue working unless |pub_location=
had a value. The documentation could then be updated to read something like |pub_location=<!--location of original publication-->
. Am I summarizing the consensus view? One unresolved issue is the text of the bold label "Country" that currently accompanies |country=
. It will need to be changed, I think, but to what? "Publication location"? –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
18:04, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
|pub_location=
vs |pub_place=
. Consistent with the CS1 style, they would be interchangeable. But I believe for the bold label that "Publication place" is more recognisable, natural and concise than the rhyming mouthful "Publication location".
Οἶδα (
talk)
21:23, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
|location=
was already in existence but not displayed. Since it was used in only 84 articles, I have removed it entirely, replacing it with the new |pub_place=
/|country=
combination.|pub_place=
as an alias of |country=
(|pub_place=
is used if both are present)|location=
as unsupported, so 84 articles will have to be checked and modified to use |pub_place=
or remove |location=
, depending on what information is already present.I have deployed this this change. Please report any problems. I did not change the order of the labels; they looked fine to me. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 01:07, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
After skipping through the The Reactionary Mind page, I was thinking about reading a passage from the full text and looked for the DOI of the book. After finding it, it wanted to make the life of future readers a bit more easy by adding the DOI to the infobox for the book. Thereby I discovered that DOI was currently not a parameter for the infobox book. Would that not be a helpful addition? And if others think so too - could this be made possible by someone with editing rights for this template? All the best! WatkynBassett ( talk) 16:08, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
|isbn=
and |oclc=
. While most books have
ISBNs and
OCLC Control Numbers, only a minority of books have
digital object identifiers. Furthermore, I suspect that nearly all books with DOIs also have ISBNs. Thus, as an identifier for books on Wikipedia, DOI is unsatisfactory and superfluous.|website=
, |external_url=
, and |wikisource=
. What's the advantage of having a separate |doi=
over putting the DOI in |website=
? The infobox isn't intended to provide every possible related link, so if there are different web pages from the publisher for various editions or for the print edition vs. online access, I don't think we should make any effort to include all of these in the infobox.|external_url=
and |wikisource=
provide for public domain works. However, accessing paid resources through libraries is a complicated task and the processes vary from institution to institution. In my experience, DOIs are often not helpful for accessing ebooks.|website=
is
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/1593/ , the publisher's webpage for the book, which provides no indication that an e-book exists, much less how to find it. The
Handle System identifier (a superset of
DOI) of
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb40178.0001.001 redirects to an ebook at
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/6w924f72t . However, although I have institutional access to this book, there is no way for me to access it through that website, even through the "Log in with your Institution" page. I can only access it by first logging into my institutional portal and then using the institutional library website to search for the book or access Fulcrum ebooks. For me, this experience is not unusual. Other times, the book may be accessible to me through a different website entirely than the one that the DOI redirects to. I realize your experience may be different.
Daask (
talk)
01:18, 16 April 2024 (UTC)|doi=
)It was brought to my attention that the current version of the template documentation ( permanent link) specifies that the "genre/genres" parameter is "(for fiction)". I propose that this documentation be revised to remove this specification, as there are nonfiction genres, such as creative nonfiction, narrative history, biography, memoir, people's history, self-help book, etc. There is the "subject" parameter specified for nonfiction, but that is not the same as genre. A book's subject could be the American Revolution, but that subject could be treated in different manners depending on if the genre is creative nonfiction, narrative history, etc. And there are already examples on Wikipedia of articles about nonfiction books using the parameter to describe a genre: And the Walls Came Tumbling Down ( permanent link) gives its genre a autobiography, and The Art of Cooking with Cannabis ( permanent link) notes that its genre is cookbook. Hydrangeans ( she/her | talk | edits) 21:23, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
Should not generally be combined with genre/genres (i. e., cooking as the subject or cookbook as the genre, but not both simultaneously).
Should be specific (e. g., memoir rather than nonfiction) and reliably sourced. Should not generally be combined with subject/subjects (i. e., cooking as the subject or cookbook as the genre, but not both simultaneously).
Checking the previous failed attempts to add a short description, I believe that we need a complete logic system for implementing a short description on a template as large as this before adding a generator. Here's a rough pseudo-code proposal I made for a potential implementation, based on WP:SDEXAMPLES:
Adding the templates main other
should be used to prevent cluttering in non-main space articles, along with is infobox in lead
to prevent incorrect short descriptions in articles where the book is not the main topic. As with any automatically generated short description, noreplace should be used. The main flaw is that lots of books that are novels say they are novels in the lead, but not in the infobox. Parsing the lead may be useful for fixing that, and some texts with the infobox are not considered strictly books, but texts. The generator should also reject anything that results in just "Book", since at that point the short description is so short it is borderline useless.
I have created a module that works as a prototype for a short description generator at Module:Sandbox/1ctinus and a template at Template:infobox book/sandbox2. It needs lots of checking to see if everything works or are missing gaps. If you are not a noob at lua like me, feel free to improve my code for performance and readability! -1ctinus📝 🗨 00:38, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
In case the above proves to be unworkable, another option is to create a temporary tracking category of articles using infobox book without a short description. Creating 12,000 manual SDs is actually not that bad of a task. You can usually copy/paste/edit something from the lead or use the SD helper gadget to import and edit the Wikidata SD. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 15:24, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
This template was nominated for
deletion or considered for
merging. Please review the prior discussions if you are considering re-nomination:
|
Template:Infobox book is permanently
protected from editing because it is a
heavily used or highly visible template. Substantial changes should first be proposed and discussed here on this page. If the proposal is uncontroversial or has been discussed and is supported by
consensus, editors may use {{
edit template-protected}} to notify an administrator or template editor to make the requested edit. Usually, any contributor may edit the template's
documentation to add usage notes or
categories.
Any contributor may edit the template's sandbox. Functionality of the template can be checked using test cases. |
This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Index
|
|||||||||
This page has archives. Sections older than 90 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III. |
Category:Pages to import images to Wikidata, which is populated by this template, has been nominated for deletion. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you.
I would like to propose a change here to change the |country=
parameter to |location=
or |pub_location=
to clear up confusion and match the usage in {{
Cite book}}. In my wide experience of observing and editing book articles, there is a constant confusion and misuse of this parameter. Using |country=
to mean country of original publication is confusing as books, nearly without exception, are published in specific locations. Usually a city, the city where the publisher is based. The standalone city name, not country, is THE standard in publishing. But |country=
is endlessly used for the writer's nationality. Typically, the author's country of origin is indeed the country where their given book was published. However, that is not always the case. {{
Infobox book}} favors the 1st edition publication of a book. First editions are periodically published first in countries that differ from the author's nationality or citizenships. Especially in today's globalized world. A book by an Indian-born writer first published in New York by Simon & Schuster should not have India in the country parameter. And yet, I cannot count how many these instances I have come across. This trend only seems to be getting worse. |location=
, but especially |pub_location=
, removes confusion here and more clearly states what that parameter is for.
Οἶδα (
talk)
19:04, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
|country=
is indeed confusing, and for novels it often gets used for the country or countries in which the action takes place (should be |set_in=
). I may have been guilty of that myself once or twice - oops. |pub_location=
would be much clearer on all counts. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MichaelMaggs (
talk •
contribs)
19:52, 14 February 2023 (UTC)|publication-place=
(and synonymously, |place=
or |location=
) and defines it as "The city of publication. If more than one town/city is listed on the title page, give the first one or the location of the publisher's head office." Do we still want to refer to the country (not the city) of publication, and if so, should we draw a distinction in naming the default parameter? (|publication-country=
?)
TheFeds
19:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
|pub_place=
or |pub_location=
, and |pub_country=
should suffice. We already make the distinction for Date (|pub_date=
). These should follow.
Οἶδα (
talk)
20:55, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
<br />
-separated list.)city, country
doesn't seem unreasonable when necessary or desirable.|country=<!--of original publication-->
to the copyable template example on the documentation page. This would induce a particular usage in new instances. More complex ones could involve manual or automated review via the bot process.
TheFeds
00:31, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
city, country
. Any change that would accommodate this standard in publishing is preferable. And I agree with changing the documentation page, which I predict is a particularly non-controversial change.
Οἶδα (
talk)
21:28, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
Would be helpful to revive this discussion because it has not aged out of relevance. Οἶδα ( talk) 12:17, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
|pub_place=
parameter than replacing |country=
at this point. Sorry if the section header is now confusing.
Οἶδα (
talk)
22:39, 28 February 2024 (UTC)|pub_location=
as an alias of |country=
would work from a technical standpoint. That would allow |country=
to continue working unless |pub_location=
had a value. The documentation could then be updated to read something like |pub_location=<!--location of original publication-->
. Am I summarizing the consensus view? One unresolved issue is the text of the bold label "Country" that currently accompanies |country=
. It will need to be changed, I think, but to what? "Publication location"? –
Jonesey95 (
talk)
18:04, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
|pub_location=
vs |pub_place=
. Consistent with the CS1 style, they would be interchangeable. But I believe for the bold label that "Publication place" is more recognisable, natural and concise than the rhyming mouthful "Publication location".
Οἶδα (
talk)
21:23, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
|location=
was already in existence but not displayed. Since it was used in only 84 articles, I have removed it entirely, replacing it with the new |pub_place=
/|country=
combination.|pub_place=
as an alias of |country=
(|pub_place=
is used if both are present)|location=
as unsupported, so 84 articles will have to be checked and modified to use |pub_place=
or remove |location=
, depending on what information is already present.I have deployed this this change. Please report any problems. I did not change the order of the labels; they looked fine to me. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 01:07, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
After skipping through the The Reactionary Mind page, I was thinking about reading a passage from the full text and looked for the DOI of the book. After finding it, it wanted to make the life of future readers a bit more easy by adding the DOI to the infobox for the book. Thereby I discovered that DOI was currently not a parameter for the infobox book. Would that not be a helpful addition? And if others think so too - could this be made possible by someone with editing rights for this template? All the best! WatkynBassett ( talk) 16:08, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
|isbn=
and |oclc=
. While most books have
ISBNs and
OCLC Control Numbers, only a minority of books have
digital object identifiers. Furthermore, I suspect that nearly all books with DOIs also have ISBNs. Thus, as an identifier for books on Wikipedia, DOI is unsatisfactory and superfluous.|website=
, |external_url=
, and |wikisource=
. What's the advantage of having a separate |doi=
over putting the DOI in |website=
? The infobox isn't intended to provide every possible related link, so if there are different web pages from the publisher for various editions or for the print edition vs. online access, I don't think we should make any effort to include all of these in the infobox.|external_url=
and |wikisource=
provide for public domain works. However, accessing paid resources through libraries is a complicated task and the processes vary from institution to institution. In my experience, DOIs are often not helpful for accessing ebooks.|website=
is
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/1593/ , the publisher's webpage for the book, which provides no indication that an e-book exists, much less how to find it. The
Handle System identifier (a superset of
DOI) of
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb40178.0001.001 redirects to an ebook at
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/6w924f72t . However, although I have institutional access to this book, there is no way for me to access it through that website, even through the "Log in with your Institution" page. I can only access it by first logging into my institutional portal and then using the institutional library website to search for the book or access Fulcrum ebooks. For me, this experience is not unusual. Other times, the book may be accessible to me through a different website entirely than the one that the DOI redirects to. I realize your experience may be different.
Daask (
talk)
01:18, 16 April 2024 (UTC)|doi=
)It was brought to my attention that the current version of the template documentation ( permanent link) specifies that the "genre/genres" parameter is "(for fiction)". I propose that this documentation be revised to remove this specification, as there are nonfiction genres, such as creative nonfiction, narrative history, biography, memoir, people's history, self-help book, etc. There is the "subject" parameter specified for nonfiction, but that is not the same as genre. A book's subject could be the American Revolution, but that subject could be treated in different manners depending on if the genre is creative nonfiction, narrative history, etc. And there are already examples on Wikipedia of articles about nonfiction books using the parameter to describe a genre: And the Walls Came Tumbling Down ( permanent link) gives its genre a autobiography, and The Art of Cooking with Cannabis ( permanent link) notes that its genre is cookbook. Hydrangeans ( she/her | talk | edits) 21:23, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
Should not generally be combined with genre/genres (i. e., cooking as the subject or cookbook as the genre, but not both simultaneously).
Should be specific (e. g., memoir rather than nonfiction) and reliably sourced. Should not generally be combined with subject/subjects (i. e., cooking as the subject or cookbook as the genre, but not both simultaneously).
Checking the previous failed attempts to add a short description, I believe that we need a complete logic system for implementing a short description on a template as large as this before adding a generator. Here's a rough pseudo-code proposal I made for a potential implementation, based on WP:SDEXAMPLES:
Adding the templates main other
should be used to prevent cluttering in non-main space articles, along with is infobox in lead
to prevent incorrect short descriptions in articles where the book is not the main topic. As with any automatically generated short description, noreplace should be used. The main flaw is that lots of books that are novels say they are novels in the lead, but not in the infobox. Parsing the lead may be useful for fixing that, and some texts with the infobox are not considered strictly books, but texts. The generator should also reject anything that results in just "Book", since at that point the short description is so short it is borderline useless.
I have created a module that works as a prototype for a short description generator at Module:Sandbox/1ctinus and a template at Template:infobox book/sandbox2. It needs lots of checking to see if everything works or are missing gaps. If you are not a noob at lua like me, feel free to improve my code for performance and readability! -1ctinus📝 🗨 00:38, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
In case the above proves to be unworkable, another option is to create a temporary tracking category of articles using infobox book without a short description. Creating 12,000 manual SDs is actually not that bad of a task. You can usually copy/paste/edit something from the lead or use the SD helper gadget to import and edit the Wikidata SD. – Jonesey95 ( talk) 15:24, 4 June 2024 (UTC)