The ultimate fix? Not quite! We're 98% there at the end of this article, but what if our brave librarian reader wants to see more about this magazine? What if they've seen another article in The Woman Citizen, but the cover looked different—was it even the same magazine? As this article notes, names are transitory, and are often not unique; "The Woman Citizen" seems pretty singular, but there's a lot of magazines out there with the same name from different time periods or countries, since a name is just an advertisement in its own market and therefore has no need to be convenient for encyclopedias. How then to tell precisely what magazine it is? Well, global librarians have solved this issue for us (multiple times, actually): add an id number. Magazines have two options: the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), overseen by the International Standards Organization, and the OCLC number, managed by an American non-profit that also maintains the Dewey Decimal system nowadays. ISSN is usually more common for magazines, but either uniquely identifies a magazine- in our case, courtesy of OCLC's WorldCat, we can see that the magazine's ISSN is 1937-142X, and its OCLC number is 2395192. Slap either of these on the citation with |issn=1937-142X and/or |oclc=2395192, and then we're at the ultimate fix. --PresN00:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
That's really if you believe ISSNs and OCLCs have value in citations. And I personally don't. If you follow them, you won't find the article you're looking for. Others disagree, but I find them to be clutter at best and Worldcat to be a very low quality database in general (with multiple redundant OCLCs for the same publication each taking you to variations of metadata). Headbomb {t · c · p · b}04:09, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I for one want all of that high-quality metadata in one place, however cumbersome. Otherwise we're just lead to a disambiguation function in... another place... Which is a whole other layer of cumbersome. This may be a philosophical difference, but citations should be one-stop shopping. The fuller, the better. kencf0618 (talk) 12:47, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Fun article! Every once in a while I sort of try to explain to someone what I was so engrossed in for an hour or 2 or 6, but it's hard to express. Headbomb, thanks! --Doncram (talk) 00:38, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Much like "How to research an image," this was a joy to read! Feels good to see a bit of research play out so well. I feel like I've been burned too frequently, not being able to trace back a source at all. Just makes it feel even better to see a success story :) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 11:34, 1 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Parenthetically, -, –, —, and ― each serve distinct functions –but that way madness lies. Hence I tend my own garden. (Which functions, I leave as an exercise for the reader.) kencf0618 (talk) 12:43, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A very nice read. It misdirected me a little because a lot of times we hear a story about someone tracing back an obscure citation on a random page, the conclusion is that the article is a hoax. But I think this shows just how difficult it is to discover a hoax: here, it really looked like the citation couldn't exist for a while, but it did. Disproving the existence of something beyond reasonable doubt is inordinately complicated. We say that readers should be able to verify any fact in Wikipedia themselves, but things are often not so simple. — Bilorv (talk) 11:18, 4 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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