Template talk:Cite isbn

Standard formatting

Shouldn't this template have a standard for formatting for names like {{cite doi}} does.

Authors of different articles in same book

How does one handle citing different articles/essays/etc from the same book? They'd all have the same ISBN, but they should be separate citations. Curly Turkey (gobble) 01:56, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't think that can be done with this template. You may have to use {{citation}} using editor= and title= for the book, and author= (or last= and first=) and chapter= for the article. Hope this helps. Regards, Illia Connell (talk) 04:06, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Basically it's undocumented but the citation can be edited with any of the citation parameters. But you might need to extend the template so the invocation allows other parameters, e.g. volume, as with page/pages and ref now. Alternatively you could add {{rp}} after the citation.

John of Cromer in Philippines (talk) mytime= Thu 11:34, wikitime= 03:34, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

oclc

Is there any possibility of cloning this mechanism to do a similar job with OCLCs? That's basically for books too old to have any isbn but notable enough to be in worldcat.org

i.e. create {{cite oclc}}. I don't know if oclc has any validation, ones I've seen are 9 digits.

John of Cromer in Philippines (talk) mytime= Thu 10:44, wikitime= 02:44, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Is this 'legal' abuse of this template?

Please look at User:Revent/UID/ISBNs/Oxford_Reference/EncycOfEnlight. The way I'm producing the effect shown in the examples is inside the ISBN templates themselves, like this.... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_isbn/978019510430&action=edit

I need to know if what I'm doing here is okay, or if it's going to break something. The way it 'looks' is cribbed from things like the odnb templates.

I've asked about this on irc and such, and basically gotten 'uh, I think it's ok', and I don't know of another 'logical' place to ask.

Also, I've explained how to use these to be more specific down at the bottom, by substituting the actual 'ISBN template' into the article, and then editing it to add the article and author names. I need to know if this is okay.

Or, alternatively, kick me upside the head and point me the right direction. :)

Revent (talk) 06:28, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

so what is the reason for substituting it? Frietjes (talk) 17:44, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Template:Cite isbn/978480531098 up for deletion---appears they don't know about Cite isbn

Does anyone want to weigh in on the deletion discussion for Template:Cite isbn/978480531098? It appears that those who want to delete it are not aware of {{cite isbn}}. Curly Turkey (gobble) 05:07, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Hyphens

Can't we replace {{{1}}} with {{replace|{{{1}}}|-|}} in the template so that any hyphens included by editors are ignored automatically instead of bothering the editors about it? —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:22, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

In the absence of comments, I created a test copy of the template, successfully tested it, and made the change (reflected in the documentation). —Largo Plazo (talk) 01:27, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Pages

Could this template have |page= and |pages= parameters? Suppose I want to cite page 42 of a book on one article, and page 99 on another; I could use:

• {{cite isbn|1590593243|42}}
• {{cite isbn|1590593243|99}}

We'd have to think of a way to control the display if both were used on the same article. perhaps

• {{cite isbn|1590593243|99|ibid-yes}}

could generate the necessary output. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:59, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

This would be quite a good idea for when this template is used just once in an article, though: there's quite a few books which are used across multiple articles but with different pages being referenced, so this template cannot be used.

The way I prefer to handle the multiple instance case is to move the {{cite isbn}} under a "Sources" sub-heading and use {{harvnb}} in each reference to link to the generated citation. I have been pondering an addition to the cite extension to allow an extra parameter ( ibid?) which would allow for two-level stacking of references, but I haven't got very far doing anything about it…

HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 15:05, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Pagenumbers are not working yet? That's sad - I can hardly use the template then. In the german wikipedia Template:BibISBN is used in this purpose and working very well. However, this template is not activated yet and nothing is done about since september 2013. --Minihaa (talk) 15:24, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

@Minihaa: try {{cite isbn|1590593243|page=99}}. if it doesn't work, you just need to add it to the template. Frietjes (talk) 21:43, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

As I envision it, this should explicitly work across multiple articles - the target page holds details of the book; the individual instances of the template indicate the pages referred to. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:25, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Vandalism

Are there measures in place to prevent silent vandalism? It seems to me that by removing the bibliographic information from the article, this template puts it off everyone's watch list, making it vulnerable to vandalism. --Srleffler (talk) 07:00, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Is there really a consensus not to use this template?

An editor has added a template informing users that the {{cite isbn}} template has been deprecated, linking to a discussion at {{cite doi}}, where {{cite isbn}} is not discussed and the closer explicitly states "there is not clear numerical majority consensus"; further, many of the arguments there don't apply to {{cite isbn}}.

Now there are editors subst-ing out {{cite isbn}}s (about a thousand). It doesn't appear to me that there is anything like a consensus in support of such a move. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 23:13, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Consensus is not based on majority opinion, but rather strength of argument. The main argument in favor of substituting {{cite doi}} is that templates should not contain article content. This argument applies equally to {{cite pmid}} and {{cite isbn}}. Boghog (talk) 02:59, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Nobody said anything about a majority. The discussion was not about {{cite isbn}}, and some of the arguments in the discussion didn't apply to this template. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 07:45, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Second that. In addition, having the content in a template makes editing more difficult (difficult to see which reference you're dealing with) and also risks vandalism, because hardly anyone watches these templates. --Randykitty (talk) 06:10, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

The question was whether there was a consensus to subst this template, not whether you agree or disagree with the result of the RfC at {{cite doi}}. Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 07:48, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

You're right, I should not rehash arguments. I you read the discussion that you link to above, you'll see that you can seamlessly substitute "ibns" or "pmid" for "doi" and the same arguments apply. So, yes, I think that closure also applies to the cite pmid and cite ibns templates. --Randykitty (talk) 08:27, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Right, you have an opinion, and I have mine. Unfortunately, I never got to voice my opinion because the discussion happened at {{cite doi}} with no notice here. I don't use {{cite doi}} because the types of sources that it serves are typically too narrow to be worth the overhead. {{cite isbn}}, on the other hand, I use when I know I'm going to use a particular book for a number of articles, which makes it worth the overhead. If I've used a book in a dozen articles, and I notice a year later that there's an error in it, how likely will I remember the dozen articles I used it in? Worse, if I discover an error in an article by someone else who has used the source in a dozen articles, I'm not even going to know about those other articles, am I? Leaving the templates as they were gives us the opportunity for a better solution than keeping the data in template space. The data can be moved seemlessly to Wikidata without having to update the thousand pages that use the template. Now that's impossible—when and if the source data is moved to WikiData, every article will have to be updated, one by one (even if by a bot).

Now we productive editors are burdened with more maintenance chores, and we didn't even get a say in it. Some "consensus". Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 11:50, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

The question heading this section is "Is there really a consensus not to use this template?" I gave you my opinion on this and I'm sorry that you are unhappy with it, but that's what you asked for. --Randykitty (talk) 12:51, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

It is just as easy to move templates that have been substituted as templates that have not into Wikidata. Also precisely which arguments don't apply to {{cite isbn}} that did apply to {{cite doi}}? Boghog (talk) 15:33, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Here are a few:

1. Issues with the bot—{{Cite isbn}} entries are not bot-generated.
2. "a large number of unwatched pages that could be subject to vandalism"—as {{cite isbn}} entries are hand-created, they go on their users' watchpages.
3. "Each citation is of very low (or no) usage"; "DOI templates are so specific that they often wind up being used only once": the precise reason I use {{cite isbn}} is to allow me to use the same source on many pages (otherwise the overhead of setting it up by hand is not worth it).

Curly Turkey ¡gobble! 19:23, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

• Deprecate I participated in the discussion to deprecate the similar cite doi template. My opinion is that this one should be deprecated for similar reasons. The last talk went on for years and I objected for the same reason that Curly Turkey raises - if there are centralized templates propagated out then they can all be corrected easily when mistakes are found. I was persuaded to change when I started looking at how bots and Wikidata will eventually aggregate all citations in all Wikimedia projects, and when I looked at the present real harm which keeping citation templates causes when information is copied in multiple articles and especially when it is translated from English to other languages. We could have this discussion again for cite ISBN but have not yet seen an argument for "cite ISBN" which would not also apply to "cite doi". Right now, both using and not using these templates cause lots of problems, and in the long run, all citations will be managed centrally, but for right now I think having full citations brings the fewest and smallest problems. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:30, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
• Deprecate Great to see this finally being carried out. This template should not be used. And we need a bot that goes around and replaces these cite doi / cite pmid / cite ISBN with cite journal / cite book whenever it finds them.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:11, 28 April 2015 (UTC)