The result of the discussion was keep. JPG-GR ( talk) 06:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
Looking for further comment on the necessity of this template. It's the same thing as {{under construction}}, except personalized. – blurpeace (talk) 15:40, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
The result of the discussion was delete. JPG-GR ( talk) 03:37, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
The template for male golfers was nominated for TfD and the concensus was delete (see Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2008_July_21#Template:Top_ten_male_golfers. It seems that the same rationale should apply to both templates. Deville ( Talk) 02:42, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
This is similar and is allowed I don't get it? Explain Please! 98.240.44.215 ( talk) 03:07, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
The result of the discussion was delete, with no prejudice toward any adjustments made to integrate it into {{ refbegin}} if the community can agree to them. JPG-GR ( talk) 22:50, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
This template, in wide use in articles on South American history, appears to be an arbitrary deviation in style from the normal reference markup provided by {{ refbegin}}, and apparently has display issues on different browsers. If the indentation it provides is desirable then it should be added to {{ refbegin}} itself rather than having two templates with slightly different formatting. Recommend that this is redirected to {{ refbegin}}. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 08:29, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Unfortunately the default (read: absence of any) presentational style for bibliographies in wikipedia is in undifferentiated bulleted-list format. When the length of the biblio list grows beyond a few entries, and individual entries start to word-wrap over two or more lines (as they are easily wont to do when the references are to scholarly publications in many fields, eg a chapter by multiple authors in an edited book or conference proceeding), then it becomes increasingly irritating & tiresome to pick out what you are looking for from the undifferentiated mass of text, or even to tell where one reference finishes and the next begins. By using a hanging indent, this template rectifies both: individual entries can be told apart at a glance, and the keyword/s (authors' names) being looked for stand out, easily identifiable by running your eye (as it is naturally inclined to do) down the left-hand side of the list.
If this approach seems novel or 'nonstandard' in wikipedia, might I suggest that this has more to do with the majority of articles paying little-to-no attention to the readability or functionality of their bibliographies/references sections. The formatting provided by this template is not really deviating from some consciously applied and thought-out presentational standard; the default is an absence of any standard. It also has to do with many/most articles' references containing only the bare minimum of information to identify a specific work cited—quite often, less than a bare minimum. If an article's given references are no more than A.N. Author, Some Book then this template prob doesn't help much. But for those editors & articles that do provide a fuller description of the work cited, it is useful.
It also has the advantage of mirroring more closely how the vast majority of real-world bibliography listings (print & online) are presented. Take at random and non-fiction work that may be to hand, look at its bibliography. You can be practically guaranteed that it will employ some kind of typographical device to separate its entries and highlight the keywords, eg. indents, other offset spacings, bolding, caps, etc. It's all done essentially for a common reason—the reader's eye soon grows tired when confronted with masses and slabs of text. Try reading a mediaeval manuscript or an 18thC newspaper, & one can readily appreciate why innovations such as spacing between words and paragraphs caught on. It's bad enough when you're just reading, but exacerbated if you're looking for something specific in a sea of letters.
I do not think this template should be merged or incorporated in {{ refbegin}} either. This latter template (which I wouldn't describe as 'normal reference markup'), has a different function, primarily all it does is reduce the text's font size ("references-small"). As refbegin is already deployed at who knows how many articles, I doubt it would be appreciated if all these unexpectedly started indenting the text as well.
Not everyone will find the hanging indent style useful or warranted, and nor should they be forced to use it. Others, besides myself, evidently do find it useful, and there's no reason to desist. It doesn't contravene any policy, nor any MOS guideline. As noted it is used in 100s of articles by now, without any ill-effect. I know of at least 4 Featured Articles that use {{ ref indent}}, its presence during FAC did not provoke any apoplectic comments from the FA reviewers. It is no more unnecessary than any of the hundreds other formatting templates and code options available, tidily formatted infoboxes, and the like.
One last comment, the so-called browser display issue is not really the template's issue, it's a minor glitch in the way MSIE treats bullets, differently and counterintiutively to other browsers. All that happens is the bullet marker in MSIE shifts to the right (ie is indented as well), and so looks a little untidy. The issue is trivially solved however, by using invisible bullet markers—a colon (:) instead of an asterisk (*)—in front of each entry, just how it's done on a daily basis on talkpages, when indenting one's comments beneath another's. I should prob update the doco to make this clearer.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 15:07, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Re whether MOS prescribes bulleted lists (and I would sincerely argue that it does not), bullets are not part of the template or under discussion, it's the indentation that the nominator appears to be objecting to. And I don't believe the MOS says anything specific about hanging indents in references, one way or the other.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 15:51, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
You are free of course to have your own opinion on whether this (or any other) template results in an ugly, or an attractive, presentation. That's a matter for your own taste. Others, such as myself, have different opinions. But WP:IDONTLIKEIT or WP:ILIKEIT are insufficient grounds for XFD discussions. Instead, if there is a particular instance (presumably it was Church of Divine Science that led you here) that you're involved in and don't think the presentation is suitable, then like anything else the first step would be to sort it out on the article's talk page with any other interested parties. In that particular case, if you want to take it out then go right ahead, if it's ok with other major contributors there. But personal dislikes on one page should not spill over into other articles where contributors are happy with and agree on it being used.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 06:56, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
<div class="references-small">
. It also sets the left margin to 1.5em, and apparently has the optional facility to display output in multiple columns (but this functionality does not work in MSIE browsers). That is all.By contrast, what {{ ref indent}} does is to apply a hanging indent if the reference's text wraps over more than one line in the browser window display. That is a different visual effect to reducing the font size; if one template was just redirected to the other then its functionality would be lost. Ref indent does not do the job of refbegin, or vice versa. In what sense are these 'doing the same thing'?
Although Chris C. has advanced the argument that these templates basically have the same purpose, ie apply formatting to references (actually they'll apply their formatting to any text that you wrap them around), it does not automatically follow that all templates used to format references should be merged into one all-purpose template, or that any one's function should subsume the others'. There exist scads of Biographical infobox templates around for example, all with a common purpose and many with similar or identical fields. It would be technically possible to merge their functionality together into one template, but is it necessary or a good idea?
However, I don't think the option of incorporating the hanging indent functionality into {{ refbegin}} can be decided upon in this TfD. It would require some discussion and consultation with the maintainers and users of {refbegin} first, as the unexpected introduction of functionality and appearance change would likely cause some alarm. It would also take some template coding nous to implement, probably outside of the responsibility of this TfD's closer. By all means, raise a separate discussion on it somewhere. Personally, while I do appreciate there can be value and savings in maintenance in some template mergers, it needs to be properly considered (look at how long it's taken to unite some of the main {cite XXX} templates to a single code engine). {Refbegin} and {ref indent} both function perfectly fine as independent templates, and they can also very simply be used together (by stacking one after the other) to produce both their effects. If you want to see smaller-text references, use {{ refbegin}}. If you want hanging indents for multi-line references, use {{ ref indent}}. If you don't, then don't. How could it be simpler?
In any event, I think the main bugbear for the nominator is the principle of whether editors should be allowed at all to apply the minor styling change to references that this template supplies. As I have tried to explain, this indent styling has a function and specific purpose, it is not purely cosmetic. It is a simple solution intended as an enhancement and visual aide for identifying entries in bibliographies. In particular, for bibliographies that may be lengthy and/or contain elements that wrap over multiple lines, where the denseness of text acts to camouflage the keywords that the reader is looking for.
Now I think that it is highly probable that the nominator, or probably most folks, has not experienced or noticed this to be an issue. Most articles' bibliographies are short, and most contain abbreviated references that take up only a single line each. This template is not for those cases. But just because someone has either never thought about, noticed, used, or imagined that this can be an issue in articles with 'fuller' bibliographies, does not mean that such issues go unnoticed by others.
Let me provide an example, hopefully this will make the intent clearer. I invite any/all of you to look for a specific reference, say Suárez 1977 or Flores Farfán 2006, in this list first. Then, try looking for the same references in this one, which uses ref indent. Can you see any difference? (NB, this is not a contrived example, it's the bibliography taken from the current Nahuatl article).-- cjllw ʘ TALK 09:17, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
The regrettable episode surrounding NYS' recent ban is a complete red herring; I can see no mention of this template anywhere in the disputes that led up to this (IMO, disquieting) turn of events.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 00:52, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
Can we get a speedy close as default keep/no consensus to delete here please, or at the very least some explanation as to why it would make any sense to go through all this again. I've always thought double jeopardy to be a sound legal principle.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 02:32, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
<ref></ref> ---> <references/>
), it is used on alphabetical bibliographies. There is no hyperlinking between citations generated by cite.php and entries in the alphasorted bibliography, unless you were to hand-code anchors for every entry and cite, or require the use of {harvnb} for every instance. Both of those options require a lot more effort, continual maintenance each time a new cite or source is added or changed, and take up a lot more space, than does this once-per-article, simple set-and-forget template. Far from being a 'random' deviation, it is a recommended way to format bibliographies in Chicago, MLA, APA, etc citation/reference styles.--
cjllw ʘ
TALK
02:22, 14 July 2009 (UTC)So while I'd agree that putting authors' names in smallcaps is a better solution to the problem, than doing nothing at all, I think hanging indents make the distinction and focus upon the sought-for keywords even sharper, and clearer. Before I worked out how hanging indents could be done I myself experimented with other methods, including using smallcaps on authors' names (note that using bullets for entries in bibliographies was not a conscious stylistic choice in wikipedia MOS; it's merely a legacy arising from wikicode itself, that had limited native options for separating list entries and text lines. I've hardly seen it used anywhere online outside of wiki). But the result still did not seem to quite do the job, hence the development of this hanging indent style option, closer also to the recommended style of many many MLA, APA, Chicago etc citation style implementations.
It (indenting) also has the advantage of remaining in place if you resize your browser window on the screen (so you can look at other windows, or documents, simultaneously, for comparision purposes say). If, as I often do, you resize browser window to occupy only the left-half of the screen, so another document can be displayed on the right, those multiline references wrap over even more lines, and any visual advantage in using smallcaps to highlight becomes diluted. By contrast, the hanging indent stays in place no matter how narrow or wide you make your browser window, or no matter what size font or resolution you use for screen display (and some people need to use larger fonts as visual aides, the larger the font or magnification, the more there will be a tendency for the refs to wrap over more than one line). Given on-screen multitasking is a la mode, I don't presume everyone reads wikipedia with full-screen browsers.
Hanging indent is at no disadvantage when a biblio list is a mix of one-line and multi-line refs. They still line up, anything you see on the left-most side of the text block must be a keyword/author's name. Your eye does not have to scan and skip over any lines that are just overflow from the rest of the ref's details.
I'd also note there are a few editors out there (I am not one of them) who apparently deprecate the use of smallcaps or allcaps this way as well; I have run across several discussions in the past and some of the comments above seem set against any variation they are not familiar with or do not use themselves. I think such objections are unsound, particularly given MOS principles specifically allow for variations to happily coexist within wikipedia—it's only when within an article that internal conformity becomes an issue.
We are at liberty to either use Cite XXX templates, or not; to include bibliography components in the chosen reference system, or do without. Or any of multiple other choices that may be made, and are probably best left to those editors who are concerned to actually work on and improve it, both in content and appearance. Taking away editors' options when they solve a need that is not or only partially met by other means, do no harm and conform with MOS principles, does not make much sense to me. It should be enough that a number of reasonable editors find it a useful, and not duplicative, facility, regardless of whether some others have no use for it.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 15:22, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
In any case, the whole point and process of trying to establish Wikipedia:Consensus#Process is to engage in discussions that are "attempts to convince others, using reasons". That is exactly what I, and some others, have been doing. It is entirely appropriate behaviour—do you not agree? How else might it be done?
If you do look again through the discussion, you'll see that several of those 'deletes' are not necessarily or explicitly against the hanging indent format per se; instead they wonder whether it might not be better to combine {ref indent}'s functionality with {ref begin}. Even the original TfD nominator was not averse to that outcome. I have discussed that point and remain open to that being resolved in one way or another if anyone else cares to continue it. Declaring 'consensus is reached' by ignoring these and the earlier 'keep' contributions does not make any reasonable sense. Presumably, if there was such a clear consensus [to delete wholesale], then this TfD would've been closed as such long before now.
Characterising my (and by implication, others') arguments as "100% WP:ILIKEIT" (an essay, not policy or guide, btw) does not stand up to scrutiny. On the contrary, numerous arguments advanced in favour appeal to demonstrations of practical use and benefit, compliance with policy, standing guidelines (& specifically a lack of prohibition thereunder) and respectable external style guidelines (Chicago, MLA etc) that also inspire wikipedia's, examples of successful use in FAC, and so on. Such arguments are not based on anyone's personal preferences. Some of the delete/merge arguments have also raised substantive comments for discussion, which is what I thought we were doing. Others have just said "I don't like how it looks", words to that effect. You do realise, you are tarring comments such as this with the same brush, don't you?-- cjllw ʘ TALK 06:41, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
The result of the discussion was keep. JPG-GR ( talk) 06:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
Looking for further comment on the necessity of this template. It's the same thing as {{under construction}}, except personalized. – blurpeace (talk) 15:40, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
The result of the discussion was delete. JPG-GR ( talk) 03:37, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
The template for male golfers was nominated for TfD and the concensus was delete (see Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2008_July_21#Template:Top_ten_male_golfers. It seems that the same rationale should apply to both templates. Deville ( Talk) 02:42, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
This is similar and is allowed I don't get it? Explain Please! 98.240.44.215 ( talk) 03:07, 10 July 2009 (UTC)
The result of the discussion was delete, with no prejudice toward any adjustments made to integrate it into {{ refbegin}} if the community can agree to them. JPG-GR ( talk) 22:50, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
This template, in wide use in articles on South American history, appears to be an arbitrary deviation in style from the normal reference markup provided by {{ refbegin}}, and apparently has display issues on different browsers. If the indentation it provides is desirable then it should be added to {{ refbegin}} itself rather than having two templates with slightly different formatting. Recommend that this is redirected to {{ refbegin}}. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 08:29, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Unfortunately the default (read: absence of any) presentational style for bibliographies in wikipedia is in undifferentiated bulleted-list format. When the length of the biblio list grows beyond a few entries, and individual entries start to word-wrap over two or more lines (as they are easily wont to do when the references are to scholarly publications in many fields, eg a chapter by multiple authors in an edited book or conference proceeding), then it becomes increasingly irritating & tiresome to pick out what you are looking for from the undifferentiated mass of text, or even to tell where one reference finishes and the next begins. By using a hanging indent, this template rectifies both: individual entries can be told apart at a glance, and the keyword/s (authors' names) being looked for stand out, easily identifiable by running your eye (as it is naturally inclined to do) down the left-hand side of the list.
If this approach seems novel or 'nonstandard' in wikipedia, might I suggest that this has more to do with the majority of articles paying little-to-no attention to the readability or functionality of their bibliographies/references sections. The formatting provided by this template is not really deviating from some consciously applied and thought-out presentational standard; the default is an absence of any standard. It also has to do with many/most articles' references containing only the bare minimum of information to identify a specific work cited—quite often, less than a bare minimum. If an article's given references are no more than A.N. Author, Some Book then this template prob doesn't help much. But for those editors & articles that do provide a fuller description of the work cited, it is useful.
It also has the advantage of mirroring more closely how the vast majority of real-world bibliography listings (print & online) are presented. Take at random and non-fiction work that may be to hand, look at its bibliography. You can be practically guaranteed that it will employ some kind of typographical device to separate its entries and highlight the keywords, eg. indents, other offset spacings, bolding, caps, etc. It's all done essentially for a common reason—the reader's eye soon grows tired when confronted with masses and slabs of text. Try reading a mediaeval manuscript or an 18thC newspaper, & one can readily appreciate why innovations such as spacing between words and paragraphs caught on. It's bad enough when you're just reading, but exacerbated if you're looking for something specific in a sea of letters.
I do not think this template should be merged or incorporated in {{ refbegin}} either. This latter template (which I wouldn't describe as 'normal reference markup'), has a different function, primarily all it does is reduce the text's font size ("references-small"). As refbegin is already deployed at who knows how many articles, I doubt it would be appreciated if all these unexpectedly started indenting the text as well.
Not everyone will find the hanging indent style useful or warranted, and nor should they be forced to use it. Others, besides myself, evidently do find it useful, and there's no reason to desist. It doesn't contravene any policy, nor any MOS guideline. As noted it is used in 100s of articles by now, without any ill-effect. I know of at least 4 Featured Articles that use {{ ref indent}}, its presence during FAC did not provoke any apoplectic comments from the FA reviewers. It is no more unnecessary than any of the hundreds other formatting templates and code options available, tidily formatted infoboxes, and the like.
One last comment, the so-called browser display issue is not really the template's issue, it's a minor glitch in the way MSIE treats bullets, differently and counterintiutively to other browsers. All that happens is the bullet marker in MSIE shifts to the right (ie is indented as well), and so looks a little untidy. The issue is trivially solved however, by using invisible bullet markers—a colon (:) instead of an asterisk (*)—in front of each entry, just how it's done on a daily basis on talkpages, when indenting one's comments beneath another's. I should prob update the doco to make this clearer.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 15:07, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Re whether MOS prescribes bulleted lists (and I would sincerely argue that it does not), bullets are not part of the template or under discussion, it's the indentation that the nominator appears to be objecting to. And I don't believe the MOS says anything specific about hanging indents in references, one way or the other.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 15:51, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
You are free of course to have your own opinion on whether this (or any other) template results in an ugly, or an attractive, presentation. That's a matter for your own taste. Others, such as myself, have different opinions. But WP:IDONTLIKEIT or WP:ILIKEIT are insufficient grounds for XFD discussions. Instead, if there is a particular instance (presumably it was Church of Divine Science that led you here) that you're involved in and don't think the presentation is suitable, then like anything else the first step would be to sort it out on the article's talk page with any other interested parties. In that particular case, if you want to take it out then go right ahead, if it's ok with other major contributors there. But personal dislikes on one page should not spill over into other articles where contributors are happy with and agree on it being used.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 06:56, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
<div class="references-small">
. It also sets the left margin to 1.5em, and apparently has the optional facility to display output in multiple columns (but this functionality does not work in MSIE browsers). That is all.By contrast, what {{ ref indent}} does is to apply a hanging indent if the reference's text wraps over more than one line in the browser window display. That is a different visual effect to reducing the font size; if one template was just redirected to the other then its functionality would be lost. Ref indent does not do the job of refbegin, or vice versa. In what sense are these 'doing the same thing'?
Although Chris C. has advanced the argument that these templates basically have the same purpose, ie apply formatting to references (actually they'll apply their formatting to any text that you wrap them around), it does not automatically follow that all templates used to format references should be merged into one all-purpose template, or that any one's function should subsume the others'. There exist scads of Biographical infobox templates around for example, all with a common purpose and many with similar or identical fields. It would be technically possible to merge their functionality together into one template, but is it necessary or a good idea?
However, I don't think the option of incorporating the hanging indent functionality into {{ refbegin}} can be decided upon in this TfD. It would require some discussion and consultation with the maintainers and users of {refbegin} first, as the unexpected introduction of functionality and appearance change would likely cause some alarm. It would also take some template coding nous to implement, probably outside of the responsibility of this TfD's closer. By all means, raise a separate discussion on it somewhere. Personally, while I do appreciate there can be value and savings in maintenance in some template mergers, it needs to be properly considered (look at how long it's taken to unite some of the main {cite XXX} templates to a single code engine). {Refbegin} and {ref indent} both function perfectly fine as independent templates, and they can also very simply be used together (by stacking one after the other) to produce both their effects. If you want to see smaller-text references, use {{ refbegin}}. If you want hanging indents for multi-line references, use {{ ref indent}}. If you don't, then don't. How could it be simpler?
In any event, I think the main bugbear for the nominator is the principle of whether editors should be allowed at all to apply the minor styling change to references that this template supplies. As I have tried to explain, this indent styling has a function and specific purpose, it is not purely cosmetic. It is a simple solution intended as an enhancement and visual aide for identifying entries in bibliographies. In particular, for bibliographies that may be lengthy and/or contain elements that wrap over multiple lines, where the denseness of text acts to camouflage the keywords that the reader is looking for.
Now I think that it is highly probable that the nominator, or probably most folks, has not experienced or noticed this to be an issue. Most articles' bibliographies are short, and most contain abbreviated references that take up only a single line each. This template is not for those cases. But just because someone has either never thought about, noticed, used, or imagined that this can be an issue in articles with 'fuller' bibliographies, does not mean that such issues go unnoticed by others.
Let me provide an example, hopefully this will make the intent clearer. I invite any/all of you to look for a specific reference, say Suárez 1977 or Flores Farfán 2006, in this list first. Then, try looking for the same references in this one, which uses ref indent. Can you see any difference? (NB, this is not a contrived example, it's the bibliography taken from the current Nahuatl article).-- cjllw ʘ TALK 09:17, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
The regrettable episode surrounding NYS' recent ban is a complete red herring; I can see no mention of this template anywhere in the disputes that led up to this (IMO, disquieting) turn of events.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 00:52, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
Can we get a speedy close as default keep/no consensus to delete here please, or at the very least some explanation as to why it would make any sense to go through all this again. I've always thought double jeopardy to be a sound legal principle.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 02:32, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
<ref></ref> ---> <references/>
), it is used on alphabetical bibliographies. There is no hyperlinking between citations generated by cite.php and entries in the alphasorted bibliography, unless you were to hand-code anchors for every entry and cite, or require the use of {harvnb} for every instance. Both of those options require a lot more effort, continual maintenance each time a new cite or source is added or changed, and take up a lot more space, than does this once-per-article, simple set-and-forget template. Far from being a 'random' deviation, it is a recommended way to format bibliographies in Chicago, MLA, APA, etc citation/reference styles.--
cjllw ʘ
TALK
02:22, 14 July 2009 (UTC)So while I'd agree that putting authors' names in smallcaps is a better solution to the problem, than doing nothing at all, I think hanging indents make the distinction and focus upon the sought-for keywords even sharper, and clearer. Before I worked out how hanging indents could be done I myself experimented with other methods, including using smallcaps on authors' names (note that using bullets for entries in bibliographies was not a conscious stylistic choice in wikipedia MOS; it's merely a legacy arising from wikicode itself, that had limited native options for separating list entries and text lines. I've hardly seen it used anywhere online outside of wiki). But the result still did not seem to quite do the job, hence the development of this hanging indent style option, closer also to the recommended style of many many MLA, APA, Chicago etc citation style implementations.
It (indenting) also has the advantage of remaining in place if you resize your browser window on the screen (so you can look at other windows, or documents, simultaneously, for comparision purposes say). If, as I often do, you resize browser window to occupy only the left-half of the screen, so another document can be displayed on the right, those multiline references wrap over even more lines, and any visual advantage in using smallcaps to highlight becomes diluted. By contrast, the hanging indent stays in place no matter how narrow or wide you make your browser window, or no matter what size font or resolution you use for screen display (and some people need to use larger fonts as visual aides, the larger the font or magnification, the more there will be a tendency for the refs to wrap over more than one line). Given on-screen multitasking is a la mode, I don't presume everyone reads wikipedia with full-screen browsers.
Hanging indent is at no disadvantage when a biblio list is a mix of one-line and multi-line refs. They still line up, anything you see on the left-most side of the text block must be a keyword/author's name. Your eye does not have to scan and skip over any lines that are just overflow from the rest of the ref's details.
I'd also note there are a few editors out there (I am not one of them) who apparently deprecate the use of smallcaps or allcaps this way as well; I have run across several discussions in the past and some of the comments above seem set against any variation they are not familiar with or do not use themselves. I think such objections are unsound, particularly given MOS principles specifically allow for variations to happily coexist within wikipedia—it's only when within an article that internal conformity becomes an issue.
We are at liberty to either use Cite XXX templates, or not; to include bibliography components in the chosen reference system, or do without. Or any of multiple other choices that may be made, and are probably best left to those editors who are concerned to actually work on and improve it, both in content and appearance. Taking away editors' options when they solve a need that is not or only partially met by other means, do no harm and conform with MOS principles, does not make much sense to me. It should be enough that a number of reasonable editors find it a useful, and not duplicative, facility, regardless of whether some others have no use for it.-- cjllw ʘ TALK 15:22, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
In any case, the whole point and process of trying to establish Wikipedia:Consensus#Process is to engage in discussions that are "attempts to convince others, using reasons". That is exactly what I, and some others, have been doing. It is entirely appropriate behaviour—do you not agree? How else might it be done?
If you do look again through the discussion, you'll see that several of those 'deletes' are not necessarily or explicitly against the hanging indent format per se; instead they wonder whether it might not be better to combine {ref indent}'s functionality with {ref begin}. Even the original TfD nominator was not averse to that outcome. I have discussed that point and remain open to that being resolved in one way or another if anyone else cares to continue it. Declaring 'consensus is reached' by ignoring these and the earlier 'keep' contributions does not make any reasonable sense. Presumably, if there was such a clear consensus [to delete wholesale], then this TfD would've been closed as such long before now.
Characterising my (and by implication, others') arguments as "100% WP:ILIKEIT" (an essay, not policy or guide, btw) does not stand up to scrutiny. On the contrary, numerous arguments advanced in favour appeal to demonstrations of practical use and benefit, compliance with policy, standing guidelines (& specifically a lack of prohibition thereunder) and respectable external style guidelines (Chicago, MLA etc) that also inspire wikipedia's, examples of successful use in FAC, and so on. Such arguments are not based on anyone's personal preferences. Some of the delete/merge arguments have also raised substantive comments for discussion, which is what I thought we were doing. Others have just said "I don't like how it looks", words to that effect. You do realise, you are tarring comments such as this with the same brush, don't you?-- cjllw ʘ TALK 06:41, 23 July 2009 (UTC)