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@JamesBWatson: Not sure if you saw the talk here before deletion of some of the references but, in short, some of the citations on the current version of the page no longer work (since the references have been deleted) and many other biographical pages on Wikipedia contain a "Selected Publications" list without them acting directly as citations, including many GA's e.g. Albert Einstein. Itzykson published hundreds of papers and those selected here have been carefully curated. Given these two points why do you think they would not merit inclusion?MajoranaF (talk) 12:44, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I now see that the article, instead of using the normal Wikipedia reference style, uses a different style, based on Harvard citations, in which there is a two stage process of linking from an inline reference to a separate list of works. I have a few things to say about that.
I don't know what advantage, if any, there is in that reference style, but I do know of several advantages of the more usual style. (a) Precisely because they are more usual, they are what most experienced editors will expect, and therefore what they will find easiest to deal with. (b) For readers, an inline reference linking directly to a citation in a list of references is more straightforward than an inline reference linking to a list which then links to another list. (c) With the citation style use here, every time any editor makes any change which affects references he or she needs to not only change the inline reference, but also check and if necessary edit the other list too. The fact that that involves a small amount of extra work is a minor detail, but far more important is the fact that most editors won't know they have to do that, so they won't do it, and the references will become a mess. Probably only a tiny minority of editors know how this alternative referencing style works: I didn't, and I have far more editing experience than the overwhelming majority of editors. (d) With the citation style use here, any editor who thinks that the "bibliography" section should be edited runs the danger of damaging the references unless he or she also checks for incoming links from inline references. There is absolutely no reason at all why he or she should know of that need.
The referencing style used in this article is derived from a method used in some print publications, where it can be very useful. However, the requirements for a printed publication are in some ways very different from those for Wikipedia, where reference lists, rather than being static lists compiled once and then printed, are dynamic, being liable to editing at any time by any editor. I strongly recommend changing to the more usual Wikipedia style for citations, as described at Wikipedia:Citing sources. If, however, for some reason you prefer to use Harvard-like referencing then the solution is to add back those works which are used as references, not all the others.
There are many reasons why "such and such an article does this" is very often not a good justification for doing the same in another article. However, from a quick look at the article on Einstein it seems that the only publications of Einstein's that are listed are those that are cited in the article. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 14:11, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@JamesBWatson:. Thank you for the reply. Your thoughts on standard referencing make a lot of sense if you see this article being edited frequently by a lot of editors, but I imagine this article, once done, will edited quite infrequently, so it will be quite easy to maintain the odd slip-up. The reason for me using Harvard referencing and giving a select bibliography is that that is what seems to be the norm on the very best biographical wikipedia articles for scientists. For example: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Johannes Kepler, Isidor Isaac Rabi etc. Your second point about avoiding arguments based on "such and such an article does this" again makes a lot of sense... but only when talking about other bad articles. Presumably when talking about what featured articles have done, it is likely that these things are the very things helped them reach featured article status. I'm not suggesting for a second that this article will ever be of that level, but I and other readers would certainly find a selection of curated works very useful.MajoranaF (talk) 15:03, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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