Talk:Retrograde (music)

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For User:Kosboot: It appears that you and I are at the moment the active editors on this article. When you first changed it from a redirect, you established a citation style of the traditional footnote type, in which full bibliographical details are contained in the notes themselves. I have been trying to keep to this style, even though I have reservations about its desirability on Wikipedia. Recently, you introduced a second, conflicting style by introducing the Newes item in a separate list of References, with inline citations using shortened references (author-page style). I see you have now added an item by Morgan to this list of References, with the intention of later adding citations. Personally, I prefer the Reference-list style, since it avoids the kind of clutter that is already beginning to affect this article. In order to maintain a consistent reference style, Wikipedia guidelines ordinarily would indicate changing to the first-established form. However, I prefer your second thoughts to your first impulse, and am seeking your agreement to changing the full-footnote style to Reference-list format. At the same time, however, there is another looming problem, which is that there is already one cited source by Morgan, in addition to the new, as-yet uncited one you added. This will require modification of the author-page format. I know that the usual course of action in such a case is to refine author-page to author-short-title-page. May I suggest instead that we use author-date-page format in the footnotes? (I imagine it might be asking too much to suggest eliminating the footnotes altogether, in favour of parenthetical referencing.)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:10, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi - I think I'm just using the same format used in other articles: When a reference is cited multiple times, rather than repeat the reference, it's listed in a section "references" and just the author's name with a page number following (as in paper-based footnotes) as in Della Fox and Santa Maria (operetta), two articles I worked on. I learned of this from User:Ssilvers. -- kosboot (talk) 12:23, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps this is true. There are certainly a great many articles on Wikipedia that do not conform to the guidelines, especially where referencing is concerned. I notice in the present case, for example, that Slepian 1947 and Morgan 1998 are each cited more than once in the footnotes, but do not have entries in the list of References. In addition, are future editors supposed to know, if they add a second ref from an already-cited source, to move the full citation out of the footnotes and into the list of References? There remains the fact that the citation formats are inconsistent: one for those cited only once, and another for sources cited more than once (and does this distinction apply to sources cited more than once, but to the same page?).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:25, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

To tell the truth, the formatting of notes on Wikipedia really bothers me because it's different from standard scholarly journals and because--as far as I've found--it is inconsistent - at least I've never found any "WP:references page." If you could point to a document that promulgates one way to doing footnotes, I'll follow it. -- kosboot (talk) 18:37, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies - I found it - going through it now. -- kosboot (talk) 19:01, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, so look at this:

Short citations - this specifically says you can combine the short citation format with the traditional format. -- kosboot (talk) 19:12, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply

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I suppose I must be going blind in my old age, but I cannot find anything in that section (with which I am already quite familiar) that says short citations with a reference list for some items may be combined with the full references embedded in footnotes for others. Perhaps you would be kind enough to quote a phrase from the relevant sentence, to help me find it. The passage does hint at the answer to your other question, however, which is that Wikipedia does not promulgate any one way of doing references, including whether footnotes or parenthetical referencing should be used (see Wikipedia:Citing sources#How to present citations, which also is the guideline I am following in seeking consensus here). You are perfectly correct, of course, that many referencing formats tolerated or even encouraged on Wikipedia would be totally unacceptable in any print scholarly journal, in any field whatever, though even there one finds creeping rot. The very common practice here of inverting author names and following them with the year of publication enclosed in brackets in full footnote citations drives me wild, since the only purpose in using this format is for alphabetical reference lists intended for use with author-date citations. Nevertheless, I am beginning to see this practice in some of the less reputable print journals.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:16, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, found it: Help:Shortened_footnotes#Notes_list. Because the text of this paragraph reads "Where shortened and long footnotes are mixed..." - that means the existence of both forms are apparently accepted. -- kosboot (talk) 18:27, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, perhaps, but I don't read it that way, necessarily. I'm sure I do not need to explain that traditional footnote formatting calls for a long form at the first occurrence, and shortened forms (usually author–short title) for subsequent citations of the same source. I assume that is what is meant at this link, since there is no mention there of an alphabetical list of Sources or References.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 20:06, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

At one point I tried using that traditional paper format (first footnote long, successive notes shorter) but more than one editor told me not to use that. Perhaps we should find some editors to discuss the issue. -- kosboot (talk) 20:17, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah - so I found this:

WP:CITEVAR - which says that styles may vary from article to article but not within a single article. So how do you want this to go? I actually prefer the short citation form since it's easier to read and this the footnotes in this article are becoming long (and I expect I'll get good mileage from the Berg article). But if you want the long ones, that's fine too. Let me know how you feel. -- kosboot (talk) 20:21, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply

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Yes, thank you. I agree with you that the format using shortened citations in footnotes with an alphabetical list of references is better, and I'm happy to make the changes myself, or share the load with you.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:29, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for doing all that work - and wow, it looks so much better! I will try to do this on all my WP edits in the future. Now, to get to that Berg article (I've been very busy). -- 12:04, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

It's only a start, but I agree it looks much better already. I didn't realize until I actually got started how many multiple entries already existed in the notes, and how chaotic it was because of this.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:10, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Regardless of the citation format you choose, it looks quite impressive. — Devin.chaloux (chat) 05:14, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We endeavour to give satisfaction :-) —Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:50, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not thrilled with the example by Hyacinth because it's too small and a little unclear (if one is not too familiar with music, one might not able to recognize the correspondence between prime and retrograde). A very clear example would be good for the lead of the article. I can probably supply a few other examples from music literature where the composer explicitly notates "crancrizans" or whatever. -- kosboot (talk) 19:34, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, but this example demonstrates that there is really no difference at all between retrograde and inversion, which is why the combination of the two always returns you to the prime form ;-). Seriously, though, this article really does not need the inversion portions of the example, and an example from the literature would be much better than a chromatic scale. I've had a quick look on Wikimedia Commons, but without success. Surely there must be a public-domain example somewhere from J. S. Bach or Machaut or somesuch—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:45, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

One could easily make one with the PD scores on IMSLP - or even with the time period you're discussing, one could enter it in their own notation program. I intend to join in this party once my life settles down, but the two of you have been doing great work thus far! — Devin.chaloux (chat) 05:02, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As a matter of fact, there are already suitable tone-row examples, used for instance here. However, we may have to dig a little deeper for a ready-made example from Ockeghem, or similar.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:49, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, digging will have to be done. But in the end, it will be worth it! — Devin.chaloux (chat) 01:14, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Shouldn't all those links be at the end of the article under "external links"? Links within the article should link to other parts of Wikipedia. - kosboot (talk) 23:45, 26 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]