Mindat Contributors Refresher Course

It's time again!

I'd just like to refresh our contributor community's memory on some Mindat policies. Formatting continues to be an issue, especially with references. Since we have some recent programming changes in the database regarding references, there are some new concerns.

Preferred format is:

Principal author's family name, given name(s)/ minor authors/year of work in parentheses/title of work/publication of work: volume(issue): page(s). This translates to:

Rocker, John L. and Jones, P.J.H. (1999), Malachite stalactites from an Iron Mine, Journal of Geoscience Nonsense: 55(3): 234-244.

This format lends consistency to the database and conserves on extraneous characters (vol.; No. or #, pages or pp., etc.)

Due to recent changes in Mindat database programming, it is now essential that the first element of data after the author(s) name(s) is the year of the work in parentheses - no month, date, or other data - just the pure simple year. Also, since we use semi-colons to separate references listed for a mineral occurrence, they should not be used within any single reference string.

If there is no author for a reference, or the author is unknown, then the publication can be first, followed by the year in parentheses, then the title of the article, then the volume, No. & page (s). Thus:

Journal of Geoscience Nonsense (1987), Sticky Onyx in Sedimentary Beds: 43(4): 199-200.

We list references in chronological order, oldest first. Undated references are last. If there are more than 1 reference in a given year, then they are listed in alphabetical order by principal author's family name for that year.

There are no "-" or "·" or other character(s) or skipped spaces before references. References are in lower case (including author(s) name(s)), with appropriate capitalization of names and proper titles. Acronyms, especially obscure ones (e.g.: NMBMGB) or local club publications such as "SRMSGMSJ" (South Round Mountain Sunday Gem & Mineral Society Journal) should be spelled out (noone outside the local area of the club would know what it means). [We must always keep in mind that Mindat is a worldwide site and our users come from everywhere and speak every language as their primary tongue. Our input should be in terms that are more easily understood by everyone - usually proper English, avoiding local jargon, abbreviations and acronyms]. Finally, there is a skipped line between references to avoid that crammed together look and delineate the end of a reference and the start of the next. This greatly enhances the ability to speed scan the reference lists. Believe me, when we are performing management review, or simply making our own contributions, this really helps speed things up. Compliance with the formats will free up management time and speed up the approval processes for new or updated locality files and photographs.

Thanks to all of our contributors for their continuing efforts to improve Mindat!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/2012 04:09PM by Chester S. Lemanski, Jr..

Actually, GFF is not an obscure acronym, it is the name of the magazine since 1994 when they renamed it after the acronym.
[geologiskaforeningen.se]

cheers

Well, to me "GFF" is completely obscure.
It doesn't help that it is an official abbreviation or acronym.

Here's a suggestion. If you had a form to capture the information, then you could enforce the rules and ensure consistency. I realize a form require some coding work.
Best regards

What I [try to] say is that it is not any longer an abbreviation/acronym - it is now a name.
You and I can think whatever we want about it, sit and wonder what it once was an abbreviation of - find it out and ponder the exotic meaning and sound of "Geologiska Föreningen i Stockholm Förhandlingar" - the fact remains, GFF is now the name.

cheers

That is a real quandry - I've always used "GFF" as the prime example of an obscure publication (except in Scandanavia of course!). I wish that they had not changed the name, but who am I???? We will have to use it as it is officially named but perhaps it should have "Stockholm, Sweden" after it.

Okay, I removed it as an example.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/16/2012 04:05PM by Chester S. Lemanski, Jr..

Hi Chester - is this, or can this be, a stick note somewhere for reference?

Maggie,

I would prefer we substitute this reminder for the present content of the Mindat users manual as I proposed be deleted some time back.

I guess I'll cut and paste your notes above and keep them as a sticky on my own computer desktop. Thanks!

Hi Chet:
I appreciate the hard work of the management and the need to standardize and simplify references and overall I like the format.
However, I feel some aspects of the referencing are getting too minimal though. I do not find things like "volume" or "number" or their abbreviations extraneous. If this site is truly meant for anyone to easily use, then something like vol. 3, no 2, p. 200 is just plain obvious to any reader and more user friendly than 3(2): 200; no translation necessary.
For the American Journal of Science, the series number must be included first too, as the volume numbers repeat within each series, at least they did in the 19th century. I've seen this left out or removed and doing so could cause confusion. How should the series number be added to the string if it isnt to be spelled out or at least abbreviated as, say, "s."?
Thanks
Fritz

Harold,

Using the down and dirty numbers for volume, issue and page(s) is pretty much self-explanatory. I don't know how many other ways this can be interpretted.

The series issue is essentially restricted to only older issues of one publication. The series number is placed before the volume. There are many examples already in the database where the old American Journal of Science was cited. This would give us:

Rocker, John L. and Jones, P.J.H. (1919), On Malachite stalactites from an Iron Mine, American Journal of Science, 4th series: 155(13): 234-244.

Using the extraneous text for volume (Vol.)(vol.)(V.)(v.) - number (No.)(#)(num.) - and page (p.)(pp.) (pages), then we can consider the foreign language designations for these terms such as: Band, Hefte, etc. - well, you see the problem we have. There seem to be an infinate number of ways to abbreviate American Mineralogist, including: Ameri. Mineral. (why bother to abbreviate at all??). Users should be reading the Mindat Manual to familiarize themselves with the database. Hopefully we will be updating it soon to cover newer policies.

If everyone follows standard formats we have a database, if everyone does their own thing we have a hodge-podge.

Chet

I prefer the hodge-podge - much easier to understand, Tom