Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes (in no particular order).
Why not distribute an electronic copy (pdf) of a style free of charge?
It would hardly cost them anything to host it on one of their web
servers. And even if that limited cost were a concern, they could
upload the file to some free hosting service (rapidshare, mediafire,
filefactory, ...) and wouldn't have to pay a single penny for it. It
would also benifit the users as electronic versions are easier to take
along when you travel and are easier to search through. Unless of
course you think the payment should be to compensate for the
intellectual input put into the reference style. But then I know you
would be joking
.
The MLA Handbook is several hundred pages (and the Chicago Manual is
more than twice as big). They do have to pay the staff that compiles
it and continues to refine it to keep up with changing conditions in
the scholarly world of communication!
Electronic versions of _anything_ are most definitely not easier to
search through. I've downloaded complete 19th-century runs of several
journals in my field, and it takes far longer to find and access
something than if I could simply open a book, flip to the index, and
flip to the pages concerned. I've had to do this because I'm at least
an hour from the nearest library that has any of them, where the
stacks are totally closed, so retrieving any volume adds another 20-30
minutes; I'm an hour and a half from the nearest library I can use
that has (most of) them on open shelves so I can go through an entire
run in a short time.
If you think the devising of reference style is such a simple joke,
let's see you devise a system that's as comprehensive and
comprehensible as the Chicago system (which I've used for nearly 40
years, including some 20 years, first as a student at the U of C and
then as both an employee [at Astrophysical Journal] and a free-lancer
for the University of Chicago Press). (There's a lot I don't like
about MLA and APA, but some of the publishers I've free-lanced for
used those systems. In England they have many varieties of what they
call "Harvard," which as we've discovered here recently has nothing to
do with Harvard University and is unknown in the US.)
And yes they should be happy that we want to use their style. The only
reason why a certain citation style is used by people is because they
are forced to by a publisher. I doubt anybody uses a specific
reference style because they think it is the best invention since the
wheel. Besides, a reference style should be the result of an
(international) standardization process. A process where openly
criticism can be given and where multiple different reference styles
would be combined in one style. Where do people get the arrogance that
only a small group (or in some cases even only one person) should
decide what is the best way to cite things for the rest of us?
Traditionally, the editor of a journal decides what style will be used
in that journal. More recently, the publishers of journals have made
those decisions, and in the US, a lot of journals happen to be
published by the University of Chicago Press, and those journals have
an international readership. The Chicago Manual was first created in
1906, and was first published for public consumption, by popular
demand, not many years later, and has been adopted as the de facto US
standard. (Americans generally don't like "government" interference in
intellectual matters, such as an "official" adoption of something like
an ISO standard would be. Note that English-speaking countries don't
have Language Academies, either; decisions about usage and
standardized orthography are made by individuals and specialized
companies, and certain of them are recognized as, again, de facto
standards -- such as Merriam-Webster in the US.)
And why do we even have multiple styles? Is the MLA style better than
the Chicago one? Then let us get rid of the Chicago one. Or is it the
other way around? Then dump the MLA one. Or are they equal? Then
combine them and get rid of the redundancy.
The two systems are about the same age. They came to be used in
different fields: the MLA, as its name suggests, by professionals in
Modern Languages; Chicago, by scholars in most other fields. There
isn't much conflict or overlap. APA came along much later and its
manual gives almost no guidance on citing books -- apparently
psychologists rarely write (or, anyway, cite) anything bigger than an
article. (Another one I encounter from time to time, because of my
specializations, is SBL style, Society of Biblical Literature, much of
whose guidelines are devoted to the transliteration of Hebrew, Greek,
and other languages, and to the abbreviation of Classical sources.)
The world of citation styles makes me think of the mafia:
- a few men have all the power. They are the only ones who decide on
how the reference format should look like;
- those with power divide the territory among them and do not harass
each other. Those are the different formats which do exactly the same
but can't be mixed;
- you get extorted by those with power. You have to pay to get a copy
of the rules you have to follow;
- and if you don't follow the rules, you get punished. Your work
doesn't get published no matter what the quality is.
I guess we are lucky that they don't use dead squads (yet)
.
death squads ...
The advantage to a standardized style (or even a couple/three of them)
is that it removes confusion from the references and makes it possible
for anyone to find anything in the ever-growing world of libraries,
both print and electronic. Remember that someone posted here quotes
from the late 19th century about how nice it was that authors were
being required to provide all the information needed by the student,
rather than expecting the reader to be as familiar with all the
literature as the expert was. (A favorite example is that The Journal
of Comparative Linguistics [its title is actually in German] has been
known for something like 120 years simply as KZ -- Kuhn's Zeitschrift
-- for its first editor, even though neither "Kuhn" nor "Zeitschrift"
appears in its title.)
BTW, thanks for noting each time you suggest that someone modify the
code, that they need to know how to deal with xml etc.!
