Template talk:R:en:DAFN

Ancestry.com link

This template used to link to ancestry.com, but the link was removed. As this is a widely used reference template, I believe having some link rather than none on a large number of pages provides much more value to our readers, so I've gone ahead and added a link to OUP's own search page, which should be unobjectionable. However, it only gives an extract, whereas ancestry.com seems to give the complete entry (I hope they paid licensing fees), so I'm not sure whether it is ideal. (Then again, the book is still under copyright so it's nice that they provide anything at all for free, and a lot of the entries are short enough to fit entirely into the extract length.) [Btw, even if you revert to the ancestry URL, the volume number parameter should stay for completeness] 70.172.194.25 19:27, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@Lambiam Why not link to ancestry.com, as it gives the complete entry? J3133 (talk) 19:51, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I followed the link from Grint to https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=Grint, from where one can only access any further info after registering. I did not realize that in general users may get some useful info for other names – albeit in “Bowdelerized” form by stripping off diacritics and italics: where the Dictionary of American Family Names has, for the surname Darwin, “from the Old English personal name Dēorwine, composed of the elements dēor ‘dear’ + wine ‘friend’”, ancestry.com has “from the Old English personal name Deorwine, composed of the elements deor ‘dear’ + wine ‘friend’”. But now I've undone the edit.  --Lambiam 20:27, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the problem is that "Grint" simply is not an entry in the DAFN, so Ancestry.com has nothing to display. A search on the Oxford Reference site yields no relevant results: [1].

As far as the stripping of formatting, that is one advantage the Oxford site has over Ancestry.com, although I guess having more complete entries is probably more valuable. Perhaps we could include both links somehow? And the third option would be to link to Google Books, e.g. [2]. 70.172.194.25 20:32, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@70.172.194.25, J3133, Lambiam: Greetings and felicitations. I'm a veteran Wikipedian, but am basically unfamiliar with editing Wiktionary. I came across this discussion while looking up a family name.

Two things. First, the Internet Archive has two copies of volume two of this book:

• Dictionary of American Family Names (Vol. 2 G–N)
• Dictionary of American Family Names (Vol. 2 G–N)

Access is free, but does require registration. This might be a better option for this volume than Google Books, as unlike that site, the IA allows access to entire volume, as long as you log in. I also checked Hathi Trust, but while it has all three volumes, they are search only.

(Regarding "Grint", I don't find it, either. The nearest entries are "Grinstead" and "Grinter" in column three on page 86.)

Second, in the template the title of the book is not italicized in my mobile browser, iOS Safari (I'm running the latest version), though it is italicized in my desktop browser. If this is not the place to bring this up, would someone please be so kind as to point me in the right direction?

Please ping me if you reply. —DocWatson42 (talk) 12:58, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

@DocWatson42 Sorry, didn't see this until now, but improving accessibility of reference templates is an interest of mine.

I agree IA > GBooks when available.

Linking to the scans is a little difficult because it mostly requires knowing the page number, which could be added as a parameter, but is not currently provided on the thousands of entries that use this template. Technically you can link to a book on archive.org or Google Books with a search query instead of a page number, but it's not as reliable; still might work in most cases. We could also just link to the front page of the volume and leave it to the end user to find the specific entry.

Perhaps the ideal solution would be to create an index of the first surname on each page, and then use a binary search algorithm to determine where any given input surname lies in the list. I did this for {{R:he:Klein}}, such that e.g. {{R:he:Klein|entry=צָבוֹעַ}} yields:

• Klein, Ernest (1987) “צָבוֹעַ”, in A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English‎^[3], Jerusalem: Carta, →ISBN, page 539(?)

The main problem with this is that it's a lot of work to enter the first word on each page for a three-volume book. 70.172.194.25 17:33, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

@DocWatson42 I made it add a page link for everything from G–N (volume 2). See e.g. Gaby, McGovern. Let me know what you think. 70.172.194.25 20:07, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

@70.172.194.25: What I wish is that Wiktionary used Wikipedia's Citation Style 1, but I guess I can't have that. Internet Archive book links to specific pages are based on page numbers of the scanned documents. E.g. https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofamer0000unse_u7y8/page/554/mode/2up links to page 554 of that book (though sometimes page numbering takes front matter which are not assigned Arabic numeral page numbers into account). Would it be possible to create a template into which a user could just drop a page number to automatically generate a page URL, without an editor manually creating page links? —DocWatson42 (talk) 22:53, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

@DocWatson42 The way Wiktionary reference templates generally work is that you only have to specify the page number, not the full page URL. For example, {{R:ett:DLE|page=167}} generates the full reference at 𐌚𐌀𐌓𐌈𐌍𐌄#References, including the page link. We have ways of dealing with offsets and more complicated page number logic when needed.

What I did was make is so that, for surnames whose names start with a letter from G to N (volume 2), {{R:en:DAFN}} by itself (no parameters necessary) generates the full citation including the page link. Compare the code and result at Minerva#Further reading. I could do this for the other volumes but it does require some work. 70.172.194.25 00:26, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Second edition

A second edition of the DAFN came out in 2022, and Ancestry.com now pulls from the new edition (see e.g. Warsaw, Wexler). The template will need to either be updated or split into 1st/2nd edition templates. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 23:55, 22 March 2023 (UTC)