Wikipedia talk:Citing sources

Non-English language citations

Where I live, in Germany, most of the articles are stubs. I have tried to find English language articles, to help expand these stubs, but have only found German ones thus far. Is it okay to use German language citations, if no English language links are available?

Broken short citations

I am using short citations in many places, e.g. Wayland Baptist University with the full reference in the Reference section and the short citation in the notes section.

That worked fine when I created it. I noticed today the multiple entries. Per the help page Help:CS1 errors it appears a title is required, even though it is not needed for a short citation.

Am I not permitted to do it this way? Do I need to convert them all to {{sfn}}?--S Philbrick(Talk) 19:57, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Title is required for template:cite book; you could just format the short citations as text instead of using the cite template. DrKiernan (talk) 20:46, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

@Sphilbrick: It's because the wrong template is being used. {{cite book}} etc. are intended only for full refs, not short; but conversion to {{sfn}}, whilst possible, isn't very practical because of the use of WP:LDRs. You also don't need to convert to plain text, instead you can use {{harvnb}} which would still sit inside <ref></ref>. For example, instead of

<ref name="Ikard 105">{{cite book|last=Ikard|pages=105–106}}</ref>

you would use

<ref name="Ikard 105">{{harvnb|Ikard|2005|pp=105–106}}</ref>

- notice that the year is included. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:56, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed.--S Philbrick(Talk) 21:34, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

  Phil: you seem to have overlooked that short citations are short because they contain only enough information (usually author and year) to find the full citation (reference). And you always need a full citation, with as much bibliographic detail as possible to aid in finding and identifying the source. Which, at Wayland Baptist University, you have. So I suggest that you use Harvnb (as suggested), and then add a "|ref=harv" parameter to your cite templates in the References section so that your short cites are automagically linked. Then you could dump the LDR list.

  Would you like help with that? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:09, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I have found it useful, when using short citations, to have the following text in my vector.js file:

// Show sfn and harv reference errors
importScript('User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.js');

It shows a red error message when a short citation does not link to a full citation. It also shows a red error when a full citation is not used by a short citation. Use of {{citation}}, which creates harvard links automatically, causes some false positives, so you might not want to leave this script turned on all the time. You can turn it off by inserting // before importScript. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:24, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

It's not specific to Vector - it works on MonoBook too - so it may be put into Special:MyPage/common.js instead. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:07, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

How easy or hard is to format references?

Hi, I noticed that many times articles about people, music bands, and other things who are referenced mainly by newspaper articles don't have many (enough) references (<ref>..</ref>).

I don't have a very good example at hand at this moment but I have seen a lot of such articles.

From my experience I would say that formatting references consumes quite a lot of time.

My question is: don't you think that sometimes the references are missing because maybe the editors don't have the time and energy to properly format them? My feeling is that this might be the case many times.

If the editors would be able to create the references in one click, do you think that Wikipedia articles would have more and better references?

I created a script (bookmarklet) that can help editors to make references in one click - User:Ark25/RefScript but it only works for a few newspapers.

If there would be some common standards for newspaper webpages, such a script would be much shorter and it would work for any newspaper using that standard.

I have the feeling that such a tool would make editor's life easier and will help developing WP articles a lot.

What do you think? —  Ark25  (talk) 20:23, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

I think that the script is fine (others exist), but the backstory is interesting: Here, some editors are upset that Ark25 likes posting interesting and potentially useful sources to article talk pages, so that other editors can decide whether to use them. One of the disputants has taken the script to MFD, apparently thinking that without the script, Ark25 won't post interesting links to talk pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:55, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

I think we need to see the ro.Wikipedia backstory, which Ark25 alluded to in his early posts at WT:TPG. The way I see it is, Ark25 has said he wants add raw references to talk pages. At first, he didn't even imply that they would be relevant. (I might put that down to English language problems, at first.) However, now he's said that he wants to add references that might be relevant. With that much of a question of whether the additions would be helpful, it would be better to attempt to ensure that someone actually read the article. With his script, one can generate a detailed reference without reading the article. The tool would make editors' work easier, but it also makes spammers' work easier, and make it more difficult to tell the difference. Since he said he would be what we consider a spammer, that is a problem. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:35, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Arthur Rubin - WhatamIdoing: Please check my answer on Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Ark25/RefScript. It would be nice to find a good place to put my actions and intentions to the test. I want to add well formatted references (including title, publication date, authors names and publication name), not just raw references. That can make a very big difference when you try to find a dead link into the printed issue of a newspaper. The links I am adding at RO.WP in talk pages are useful links. Of course I am not just posting random links, that was implied (in my view) by the kind of examples given in the messages before the one talking about RO.WP. Sorry, I'm not sure where I suggested that they might be relevant. When I said might I meant: If you don't find some particular overlooked information in books, then check the talk page, the overlooked info might be in the links I gathered. And I have also said: Of course, sometimes I fail, adding links that have outdated information or simply not usable information. But I'm not perfect. However, it was not my point to suggest that the links are semi-random, just thrown there with the excuse that it might have something good in it. I would not waste my time to post something without value. Example the ro:Polisano is a company. In the talk page, ro:Discuție:Polisano, I posted 3 links containing information about the company and the owner of the company and about his wife. His wife is investigated for fraud, and he committed suicide.

Those who don't read the article can post the reference without even formatting it. And if they are spammers, there is very low chance they care to properly format the references. Or would they? A spammer trying to disguise himself so careful as an editor? Hmm.. I really don't know now. But most likely they just want raw references to increase their rankings (now we are talking only about articles, not about article's talk pages).

Yes, the script can help someone to add a quick reference to a lower quality article (e.g. Daily Mail?) but It can also help someone else to quickly replace that reference with a better one, say for example from New York Times.

Still, the question remains: how much time WP editors are wasting for manually formatting references?

Sorry for being a bit ironic in my first message for you but I think there you rushed a bit to jump to conclusions. —  Ark25  (talk) 02:39, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

WP:REFLINKS is one of the standard methods of formatting references; see its "see also". Johnuniq (talk) 05:13, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

It will be interesting to see if Reflinks survives the announced shutdown of the toolserver. If it does not, a new Reflinks-like tool will probably be in demand. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:56, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately there is a dispute where the author wants a gigantic amount of disk storage for caching, see VPT Feb 2014. We might hope that something will arise if it dies completely—there would certainly be a fuss. Johnuniq (talk) 10:01, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Question about journal citations

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, so please point me at a better page if one exists. I am working on an article with several journal citations, which I don't often run into. Typically what I do is have a references section, listing books, and then the citations are in short form: "Smith, Book Title, p. 123". Are journals typically listed in the references section? If so, is there an accepted shorter form for the citation itself (e.g. "Grootes (1992), p. 123"), instead of the full citation to the journal in the footnote? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:37, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

I have seen some articles where only books are listed in the "References" section, and the "Notes" section contains short citations for the books, and full citations for the other stuff, including journals. I have also seen articles where everything is listed in "References" and all the footnotes are short citations.

If you were using Citation Style 1 or the {{tl|Citation]] template you would not need to ask 'If so, is there an accepted shorter form for the citation itself (e.g. "Grootes (1992), p. 123")' because the {{sfn}} template would dictate the format. Since you apparently are not using either of these, what style guide are you using? Are you just making it up yourself? If you are making it up yourself, you will only be able to use it on articles you create; for existing articles you will have to follow the existing style.

Although making up your own style is allowed for new articles, I don't recommend it, because if another editor wants to add a source of a different type from what already is present in the article, the editor won't know what to do. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:52, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

In the past I've tended to just replicate whatever citations I see already in the article. I haven't paid much attention to the templates themselves, and when in doubt I've just replicated the text I needed without using templates, so I'm afraid I'm quite ignorant about the finer points of citations. I'm now finding the citation templates a lot easier to use because of the visual editor, and would like to become more knowledgeable about them. I am using {{cite book}} and {{cite journal}} in radiocarbon dating, but I don't follow your comment that the template would dictate the format -- can you explain? Do you mean it would dictate the format for the long citation, and doesn't generate any form of short citation? If so, I agree, but I wouldn't be using the template for the short form, I assume -- only for the form that appears in the references.

I've certainly seen the first style you mention, where journals are not included in the references list. Are there any arguments pro and con this approach? It's always seemed to me that it would be a kindness to the reader to list the journal articles cited along with the books, but then the long form citations in the notes seem unreasonably cumbersome. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:04, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

See King's Cross railway accident#References. Of the eight full citations, five are books; two are magazine articles; one is a website. All of them are linked from Shortened footnotes in the Notes section above. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:32, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you; that's exactly the sort of example I was looking for. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:37, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Multiple uses for citations re: topic sentence: "Citations are used to ..."

The lead sentence is incomplete (and/or ambiguous) and inaccurate as stated. It is not completely the case that: "Citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which an article is based."

1. Citations have multiple uses, not just one.
2. Citations are identified with specific factual claims, not entire articles.

Suggestion:

"Citations are used to identify, locate, assess, and access the reliable source(s) on which a factual claim in an article is based."

I could cite some reliable sources on the multiple uses of citations, if that is not deemed obvious.

That a specific citation is not applicable to an article as a whole seems self evident, but I stand to be corrected.

Opinions? Paulscrawl (talk) 03:44, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Even if it were strictly speaking true, I don't think that it would be helpful. The purpose on the English Wikipedia is to tell the reader (who may also be an editor) where that piece of information comes from, i.e., "identify". Source assessment is something that editors do, not citations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:34, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

The problem is the lead sentence does not make it clear who is using the citation. The editor who inserts a citation does indeed use the citation to identify the reliable sources on which an article is based. The reader may use the citation to do the things described by Paulscrawl. The reader can do whatever he/she wants to with the citations. If the reader has printed the article, the reader can even use the citations to line a birdcage. Perhaps there is a way to clarify this point.

Citations can be inline, in which case they are likely to support a specific claim in the article, or they can be general, in which case the citation supports, to some degree, the entire article. Perhaps the most common general citation occurs in articles about books, plays, or movies. The book, play, or movie is cited by implication (if not explicitly), and it supports all factual claims about the content of the book, play, or movie. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:55, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

  Agree with W. Citations identify and help locate a source, but they are not used (nor should be) to assess a source, nor even to note an editor's assessment of the source. If such an assessment is useful it can be added as a comment following the citation, but the citation itself does not do that. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:05, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

The editor would not put the editor's assessment of the quality of the source within the citation. However, the reader, upon seeing a statement in Wikipedia with a footnote number next to it, might wonder if the source is a good source. The reader then clicks on the number and discovers the source is published by Yale University Press. The reader might conclude it is a good source. So in that sense the reader uses the citation to assess the quality of the source, although you could say the assessment in the reader's mind is a by-product of identifying the source. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:58, 7 July 2014 (UTC)