Template talk:RecordSearch

Name of this template
Thomas Lerman raised the question about the name of this template in a forum post. His suggestion was RecordSearch. I would not object to a name change, but I think the reason I choose CID still holds.

Firstly I noticed that Horandm was creating article for various record search collections, such as England Cheshire Nonconformist Church Records and including at the bottom of the article a line of code that included a CID ref. Why this is being done and why the coding is in a particular format is still unclear to me.

I also coded the template to include an optional display text parameter, but if that is not given the default display is


 * CID #######

Finally, when coding an article, templates with short titles are easier to type. --Steve 20:41, 9 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Although I would agree that short titles are easier to type, I believe this may be a mistake. CID appears to be the name of the ID used in the URL to identify which collection is being used within the Record Search product (although it is still considered a pilot product at this time). To me, using this name to reference something within Record Search is not very intuitive nor user friendly . . . maybe even a bit geeky (I resemble that remark, by the way). Being not intuitive, I believe it will be harder for people to remember. It would be similar to referring to a record contained in Ancestry as dbid since that is the database identifier they use in their URL. Similarly, the IGI uses recid and the new FamilySearch uses bookid. If a template was created for these (very unlikely), I would be opposed to them be called recid and bookid respectively. It would make more sense to me to use the actual source name rather than an identifier that is used for internal purposes. Thomas Lerman 00:58, 13 August 2009 (UTC)