Citations for RW references

[Bill Hibbert]

Chris Pickford:

> ... I find that the Ringing World is often cited by issue number

I'm not pretenting to set any policy in my reply to this, just 
provide some excuses!

It's quite common in the publishing world (and in the RW) to refer to 
issue numbers rather than dates, at least for weekly publications. 
This is very meaningful for those directly involved in production, 
but not at all meaningful, as Chris points out, for the general 
reader.

When I rebuilt peals.co.uk to add all the extra facilities 20 months 
ago (and what a job that was!) the 20 years of data inherited from 
William Hall used issue and page numbers as a means of reference. I 
continued this practice because a) it makes it straightforward to 
maintain the data in the RW office, because they work with issue 
numbers, and b) it avoided some significant changes to the software 
that displays the web pages. It is easy to translate in software 
between issue numbers and dates (there is some software in 
peals.co.uk that does this) but I didn't want to change all the page 
layouts on the website.

The ringing world refs in Felstead are provided via an electronic 
feed from peals.co.uk, which means it uses the same format.

It would be interesting to know the strength of feeling for a change, 
if and when we are next doing significantr software changes to the 
site.

Regards,

Bill H