The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 19:29, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

The London Fever Hospital

• ... that fever hospitals (London's pictured), for infectious patients, were once the most common type of hospital in England and Wales?

• Reviewed: Revels (Inns of Court)
• Comment: Fever Hospitals and Fever Nurses says "By 1914 fever hospitals were the largest single type of institution in England and Wales".

Created by Andrew Davidson (talk). Self-nominated at 21:39, 13 May 2020 (UTC).

Overall: The citation should be put at the end of the sentence stating the fact in the article for the convenience of readers. And the Google Books URL should be added to the citation so that readers can access it easily. Sainsf (t · c) 04:08, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

• @Sainsf: Thanks for the review. I have repeated the citation at the end of sentence in question. Google Books URLs are not appropriate for several reasons including:

1. Google is a commercial site and we should not promote their business ahead of other search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, &c.
2. By using the ISBN as the blue link for the source, the reader is offered a variety of services for accessing the book - libraries, purchase, &c.
3. Deep linking into Google Books is technically unwise because the site's behaviour is not predictable – the output varies depending on the user, location and other factors.
4. The book in question is a major source for the topic and my citation preference – using {{r}} with page numbers – does not support URLs. See WP:CITEVAR.

Andrew🐉(talk) 10:29, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

• I don't think using Google Books to provide an easy online access to a source is a bad practice, I have seen the use of (and have myself used) Template:Google books in many articles including GAs and FAs. WP:GBOOKS discusses the usage and does not seem to discourage it. The page number format won't be disturbed as you can just say "pg=frontcover" in the citation template which directs the reader to the book cover, from where they can go to the required pages. I did not say it is a must but it would be a great help, especially as this is DYK and an easy means of verification, compared to the tougher offline access means, should be provided if possible. You are right about the unpredictable behaviour, but seems editors generally favor the short-term advantage at least. Sainsf (t · c) 10:59, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

• I continue to think that direct links to Google books are not appropriate, for the reasons given. Myself, I typically use Amazon to purchase books when working on articles. Amazon often provides a "Look inside" preview which can be helpful but it would not be appropriate to link to that either. If the exact text is important then I use the quote parameter in the citation but that does not seem necessary here. As this is a matter of editorial preference, per WP:CITEVAR, the issue does not seem relevant to DYK. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:09, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

• That's right, there are no issues in promoting this. Good to go. Cheers, Sainsf (t · c) 09:44, 22 May 2020 (UTC)