Wiktionary talk:Votes/2017-03/Reference templates and OCLC

Rationale
To be provided by supporters. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:52, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Some thoughts
It seems OCLC is an identification number that is available even for old sources that do not have ISBN. Thus, it could be placed to very many templates.

I deem such identifiers as OCLC to be visual noise of almost no utility for our readers. Our readers want to find out about words, and need to click the first item of our external link templates, which takes them to the page which they wanted to visit to learn more about words. OCLC seems to satisfy identification fetishes more than any real need or a real user.

For those use cases where OCLC finds any real use for the ultimate user of the dictionary, it can be placed to an appendix linked from the reference template. Thus, those who really need the number will find it, and those who want to have less busy, focused mainspace pages providing the information of real interest to our readers will have them as well.

--Dan Polansky (talk) 07:52, 18 March 2017 (UTC)