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Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can clust

Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references. This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_. It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US: > Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name. [0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0002.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...

bee_rider 2mo ago
Hmm, like in the References section for a paper? Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out (bibtex handles it more accurately that I could anyway). For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text. Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.
- moregrist 2mo ago
  > Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied. > I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite. You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into. The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again. While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.
  - patcon 2mo ago
    Thank you :)
  - bee_rider 2mo ago
    I do have a PhD, and I have crawled up the trees of citations on occasion. But they were not so huge that I needed to manage them actively. But it was STEM, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that more complex bibliographies exist elsewhere.
adverbly 2mo ago
> Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. That's not what I said or what I intended to imply. I think it's stupid because It sounds like the thing that I would assume almost nobody encounters. Like so few people that this is not needed. If more than 10,000, people have ever typed this thing out for its intended purpose, I stand fully corrected. The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards. How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard. This isn't some some language that thousands of people speak. To me this seems like some weird thing that some drunk academic came up with and told his friends about. Also, this thing is freaking huge. How many characters are this wide? Should the bar be higher to introduce obviously weird characters?
- ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
  >I would assume almost nobody encounters That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.
  - adverbly 2mo ago
    That analogy is not accurate. To make it accurate, it would be like if there was only one store you could ever buy things from and that store had a limited number of shelves, and someone came along and wanted to use up one of the shelves that to sell an old tool that few people need, and they also only accepted a weird form of payment that would randomly cause issues with some people.
    - Timwi 2mo ago
      I think we're getting at the heart of your misunderstanding. You seem to feel that we're running out of codepoints in Unicode (the “limited number of shelves” analogy). This could not be further from the truth. Although the number of codepoints is technically finite, it is extremely large (over a million) compared to how many we need (currently only 160,000 are defined, and for obvious reasons the rate of new additions is slowing down). The Unicode roadmaps main page[0] displays only 5 of the 17 available planes because the remaining 12 (each 65,536 codepoints large) have not yet had any characters assigned to them whatsoever. [0] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/ https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/

bee_rider 2mo ago

Hmm, like in the References section for a paper? Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out (bibtex handles it more accurately that I could anyway). For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text. Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.

moregrist 2mo ago
> Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied. > I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite. You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into. The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again. While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.
- patcon 2mo ago
  Thank you :)
- bee_rider 2mo ago
  I do have a PhD, and I have crawled up the trees of citations on occasion. But they were not so huge that I needed to manage them actively. But it was STEM, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that more complex bibliographies exist elsewhere.

adverbly 2mo ago

> Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. That's not what I said or what I intended to imply. I think it's stupid because It sounds like the thing that I would assume almost nobody encounters. Like so few people that this is not needed. If more than 10,000, people have ever typed this thing out for its intended purpose, I stand fully corrected. The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards. How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard. This isn't some some language that thousands of people speak. To me this seems like some weird thing that some drunk academic came up with and told his friends about. Also, this thing is freaking huge. How many characters are this wide? Should the bar be higher to introduce obviously weird characters?

ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
>I would assume almost nobody encounters That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.
- adverbly 2mo ago
  That analogy is not accurate. To make it accurate, it would be like if there was only one store you could ever buy things from and that store had a limited number of shelves, and someone came along and wanted to use up one of the shelves that to sell an old tool that few people need, and they also only accepted a weird form of payment that would randomly cause issues with some people.
  - Timwi 2mo ago
    I think we're getting at the heart of your misunderstanding. You seem to feel that we're running out of codepoints in Unicode (the “limited number of shelves” analogy). This could not be further from the truth. Although the number of codepoints is technically finite, it is extremely large (over a million) compared to how many we need (currently only 160,000 are defined, and for obvious reasons the rate of new additions is slowing down). The Unicode roadmaps main page[0] displays only 5 of the 17 available planes because the remaining 12 (each 65,536 codepoints large) have not yet had any characters assigned to them whatsoever. [0] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/ https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/