Universal locator type
Having to quote a theatre play, I found that current locators did not meet this requirement. (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/14606/locator-for-plays-citer-une-piece-de-theatre)
Beyond this specific case, it is foreseeable that the development of Zotero will create new needs in locator's types. It probably won't be possible to satisfy them immediately.
That is why I think it would be particularly useful to have a universal locator type, without any associated label.
Users would have to enter the label (if necessary), as well as the locator, on each citation. This imperfect solution would at least allow managing correctly the ibid-with-locator and ibid functions.
Is this possible? If yes, how long would it take?
Thank you
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Ayant à citer une pièce de théâtre, je me suis aperçue que les locators actuels ne répondaient pas à ce besoin.
Au-delà de ce cas particulier, il est prévisible que le développement de l’utilisation de Zotero ne peut que créer de nouveaux besoins en types de locators. Ceux-ci ne pourront probablement pas être satisfaits sur-le-champ.
C’est pourquoi il me paraitrait particulièrement utile de disposer d’un type de locator universel sans libellé associé, à charge aux utilisateurs de saisir eux-mêmes (si besoin) ce libellé lors de chaque citation. Cette solution imparfaite permettrait au moins de gérer correctement les ibid et ibid-with-locator.
Est-ce possible ? Si oui, à quelle échéance ?
Merci
Beyond this specific case, it is foreseeable that the development of Zotero will create new needs in locator's types. It probably won't be possible to satisfy them immediately.
That is why I think it would be particularly useful to have a universal locator type, without any associated label.
Users would have to enter the label (if necessary), as well as the locator, on each citation. This imperfect solution would at least allow managing correctly the ibid-with-locator and ibid functions.
Is this possible? If yes, how long would it take?
Thank you
___________________________
Ayant à citer une pièce de théâtre, je me suis aperçue que les locators actuels ne répondaient pas à ce besoin.
Au-delà de ce cas particulier, il est prévisible que le développement de l’utilisation de Zotero ne peut que créer de nouveaux besoins en types de locators. Ceux-ci ne pourront probablement pas être satisfaits sur-le-champ.
C’est pourquoi il me paraitrait particulièrement utile de disposer d’un type de locator universel sans libellé associé, à charge aux utilisateurs de saisir eux-mêmes (si besoin) ce libellé lors de chaque citation. Cette solution imparfaite permettrait au moins de gérer correctement les ibid et ibid-with-locator.
Est-ce possible ? Si oui, à quelle échéance ?
Merci
edit - ah OK - it's about the ibid.
How exactly does ibid work? Does it compare only numbers, or strings, too?
i.e. if I cite
Act 3, S. 1
twice in a row - will that show up as ibid. the seconde time?
Thanks to your precious explanations, I discovered the use of the citation panel, and adapted a 'bibliography with full notes' style (available at https://sites.google.com/site/llcommun/home).
Apparently Ibid tests the whole string.
Example:
If I use an existing locator, such as "page", and enter (without quotes)
1. "Acte 1, Scène 2"
2. "Acte 1, Scène 2"
3. "Acte 1, Scène 3"
I obtain :
1. S. BREDELOUP, « Les entrepreneurs migrants chinois au Sénégal, La métaphore du jeu de go? ». In : Le Sénégal des migrations : Mobilités, identités et sociétés. Paris : Karthala, 2008, p. Acte 1, Scène 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. Acte 1, Scène 3.
whereas, if I enter the same information in the a suffix, I obtain :
1. S. BREDELOUP, « Les entrepreneurs migrants chinois au Sénégal, La métaphore du jeu de go? ». In : Le Sénégal des migrations : Mobilités, identités et sociétés. Paris : Karthala, 2008 Acte I, Scène 2.
2. Ibid. Acte I, Scène 2.
3. Ibid. Acte I, Scène 3.
to obtain the same result as with Ibid, I would have to enter :
1. ", Acte 1, Scène 2"
2.
3. ", Acte 1, Scène 3"
that means that I would have to care about the rank of the quotation, and about the punctuation marks, which is much less convenient.
That is why, if no better solution, I intend to remove the label of "sub verbo" in my style. But I would much prefer to use a standard locator (with no label), so as not to pervert the meaning of an existing locator.
N.B. I just did a test, but "sub verbo" is not recognized (as I could read on another post, later on), so I should have to test all the other locators to remove the "sub verbo” label, as follows :
<if locator="page book chapter column figure folio issue line note opus paragraph part section volume verse" match="none">...
In case new locators were added, my style will ignore them, which is not a good thing
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As I said before, I am convinced that it would be useful to other users, with different needs in locators.
The main argument against a universal locator type is portability I think.
However, as it is done at the moment with item types and fields, it would be great to examine locator types and, also, the way zotero allows users to call them (one by citation, no multiple locators).
A wiki would be a good starting point maybe.
Is relevant to this the need of "tome" and "verset": see this topic (about French localization).
Acte, then Scene, then verse (if the play is in verse).
That means 3 locators for one single citation
2/ Since it's quite long, and the potential readers all know these references, we just cite :
III, 2, v. 345
That's why, in addition to more locator types and multiple locators, we would appreciate to have the possibility to associate to each locator a supplementary field "suppress locator-label" (default-value="no"), in the same way there is "suppress author".
If we consider the readers of the document all know a reference, we would enter the reference with the option "suppress locator's label" for some locators.
To obtain
III, 2, v. 345
we would enter:
Acte (suppress locator' s label=yes)
Scene (suppress locator's label= yes)
Verse (suppress locator's label=no)
but if we consider the readers don't, we would choose to display the locator's labels, we would want to display:
Acte III, Scène 2, v. 345
So we would enter:
Acte (suppress locator' s label=no)
Scene (suppress locator's label= no)
Verse (suppress locator's label=no)
3/ "universal locator" might not the right word.
What I suggest is a locator which has an empty label.
The label (if wanted) would be entered in the location itself by the user himself
(that's what we do for the moment, using "sub verbo")
So I don't see why such an universal locator would cause portability problem
4/We don't use verset.
As verse are concerned, we refer to them:
alone, combined with page, or as above.
There is no reason why they couldn't be combined with Tome, Volume, Livre, Chapter...
5/ We also use "multiple locators" such as Livre + chapitre + page, as:
liv. III, ch. IX, p. 177.
This is not exhaustive, it just corresponds to precise examples already encountered. In the future, we certainly have other demands.
1/ Since Zotero has introduced the locator's types, it would be nice to have more locators and multiple locators that would match precise demands thoroughly.
Users would only have to choose the right locator, and wouldn't have to bother about the labels.
But it certainly implies great change
2/ A locator with an empty label requires more attention from the users, who must know and remember what label corresponds to each zotero-not-defined locator (simple or combined).
But just considering things from a practical point of view, a locator with empty label would allow to solve many situations.
I suppose it would be much easier to realize
In any case, the strategic question is what criteria we use for adding new locators.
We may be able to avoid that, though, if we consider that there are actually two separate types of locator label: (1) descriptive labels that require localization; and (2) instrumental labels that should be pegged to a fixed form appropriate to the cited source and the language of the document in which the citation appears.
I'll go out on a limb here, and propose that the pinpoint locators for legal materials fall under (2), and should not be subject to style-level localization. [1]
We'll see what the response to that suggestion is, but if it's correct, then l2lafitte's proposal of a "wildcard" label (however implemented in CSL and in Zotero) would actually be pretty satisfactory for legal writing. The critical things that the processor must know to render this category of locators correctly would be: (a) the locator string itself, including the label; and (b) the fact that a label is present (so that the comma-splice used in many styles when the "page" term is empty can be avoided). A "wildcard" item in the pulldown list of labels would be sufficient for that.
If law-related issues are removed from the mix, we're left with "Act" and perhaps a few other descriptive labels, which would be feasible to add.
I hope that description is clear, I'll follow up with clarification if it comes across as murky.
[1] After writing this, it occurred to me that the main attraction of the descriptive locator terms in the pull-down is not switching between languages, but switching between the forms of the locator (long, short, symbol, etc). On this latter point, too, I would propose to suggest that legal resources call for a fixed form of locator labels, which holds across all styles for that resource.
I understand why we shouldn't add everything to the drop-down menu, but "Article" (abbreviated "art") is not just used for pinpoint references in certain constitutions, but also in every statute of many European legal systems. Most importantly, however, it is THE reference for ALL international law instruments. Given that there are more than 158000 treaties on file at the UN and a massive and increasing amount of international law literature, this would seem to make "article" obligatory.
It seems somewhat ridiculous to me as an international and comparative lawyer that there's no space for "article" in the drop-down menu, yet space for "opus", "sub verbo" and "verse". Just to show this is not merely a personal bias, google searches of "article I" OR "article 1" come up with over 46 million hits, more than opus, sub verbo, verse and probably a couple of other Zotero pinpoints all put together.
The absence of "article" in the locator/ pinpoint menu is clearly an anachronism which needs to be corrected as soon as possible.
Lately I've been wondering whether the UI might restrict the list of locators to a subset for each item type, with some sort of "...more" facility to access the rest.
Another possibility would be to recognize the leading part of the locator as a hint to the locator label -- typing shorthand labels directly into the field would be faster than dealing with the pulldown, and a list of short-form hints (like "art. ") would be easy to remember.
(Re my proposal above to just treat the entire locator as a dumb string for the legal types, I've recently been disabused on that notion. The OSCOLA style requires that paragraph numbers be wrapped in brackets. Other styles will require "para. " or similar, so retaining localization is important.)
Now that I'm about to submit my first article (on international law) written using Zotero, I've realised that the absence of "article" or a blank/universal locator means I have to re-do all my footnotes manually anyway (and re-do them again after I add or edit any underlying references -- the ibid problem). Needless to say this removes a large part of the utility of Zotero and I almost regret going to the effort to set up a Zotero library to use Zotero for this article.
It's a great shame that some stubborness over what seems like such a small thing as a locator can make Zotero much less usable for all lawyers who need to cite international, constitutional or non-Anglo-American legal instruments.
Can anyone help with a workaround in the meantime? The best way around it I've found so far is to enter them all as "section", so as to get the ibid and locator placement right, then doing a Word find and replace of "sec" for "art" at the end. I just hope it doesn't change them back to "sec" if I have to change the underyling source data or change the citation style for a particular publisher.
I find the suffix workaround about clumsy because of the "ibid" problem and the placement of the locator in references and styles where you want to include, for example, a URL, but would be grateful for any other ideas for workaround techniques. Thanks.
For the moment, since we don't use the "sub verbo" locator, we use it as a void locator, and we enter the real locator in the suffix field.
(see http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/17742/locators-zotero-216/#Item_20)
we just define it as :
<term name="sub verbo" form="short">
<single></single>
<multiple></multiple>
</term>
ibid works correctly
Hoping it can help
I tried the sub-verbo work-around, but the Ibid doesn't work in the citation style my publisher requires, so I have to alter all the footnotes manually (a frustrating job).
Is it not possible to add an "other" identifier that would allow pinpoints not in the drop-down to be added without the ibid problem?