Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Citation cleanup

Pages with duplicate reference names

This is the first WikiProject I'm joining. I forgot where I originally found the Category:Pages with duplicate reference names link from, I think it was from a technical discussion related to adding warnings and automatically categorizing articles with redundant reference names. As I started slowly going through it, I wondered if there was a related WikiProject, and this seems to be it. The backlog is so huge, that I'm inviting others to also join in . I'm not sure who started, but when I did, apart from recently changed articles, the A-B was already done.

It's a mostly systematic and boring task, but apart from exceptions, per-article work is not too long, so it's easy to just put in some available time, and stop anytime. I so far found a few sometimes challenging aspects, maybe some of this could eventually be part of the WikiProject documentation:

• Infoboxes may already have reference tags, so duplicates may still show up for some sources when the deduplicating work is fully done. Checking the infobox template, then fixing the article source to use that reference may be necessary. I have lost half an hour fiddling with references on an article before discovering this. Common examples are country census data.
• Some climate articles include chart templates causing some citations to clash.
• It may be difficult to quickly distinguish identical and redundant inline citations. When an article is especially messy, copying all or most citations to the reflist (Help:Footnotes#WP:LDR), and then replacing inline references with tags seems to help.
• It is unfortunately common for articles to have multiple citations with a common redundant tag, as well as a number of inline references to that tag. This means that precise information, if it once existed, was already lost. Checking external references to fix these may take longer, or may not be possible. When those point to multiple parts of a single site, or multiple pages of a single book, a strategy may be to consolidate those into one generic link to that resource (i.e. a range of pages, or sometimes just the whole book, etc).
• I come across various citation templates which I'm not always familiar with, so some articles require me to read the Wikipedia citations documentation.
  • Song articles often use the singlechart or Certification_Table_Entry templates which support the optional refname parameter.
  • Schools using the NCES School ID template support the optional ref_name parameter.
• The red error message shown about the redundancy shows a tag name. This name is not always obvious to locate in the article source, because various characters are substituted. Moreover, some citation templates automatically aggregate information into tags.
• And of course one encounters many other types of citation related bugs when doing this (incomplete or obsolete accessdate, external links in website, red links, etc). It can also be the opportunity to add relevant top-page tags, categories or stub-template whenever necessary.
  • Short incomplete articles needing stub tags near the bottom using the appropriate stub category template
  • Tagging articles with bare URL citations using {{cleanup-link rot|date=<month year>}}

That's about it for now I think. PaleoNeonate (talk) 19:21, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

RfC: Ease switching of citations between citation templates or no citation templates

Please see Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RfC: Remove the bullet point that starts "adding citation templates..." Jc3s5h (talk) 14:46, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Category:Pages with broken reference names

Hello. I was wondering if anyone would like to help me go through the backlog at Category:Pages with broken reference names. There is currently around 3400 articles to go through. Thanks :) --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 00:09, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

Verifying sources

It would really help verification efforts if citations with restricted access would include a supporting quote. Would there be support for developing this as a project guideline? Background: I have been cleaning up citations aiming to improve dozens of WP:SOIL articles. My core effort is to verify that source(s) establish notability (see We need a culture of verification). Some otherwise reliable sources cited are unavailable to verify. This is especially problematic when I want to copyedit and I don't know what aspect of the content is supported by the citation. My solution is to replace the citation, instead citing from among the most current of my college soil textbooks. When I do this, I tend to use the quote= field in the cite template to leave a verbatim snippet supporting the content. I would like to encourage others to do this also. -- Paleorthid (talk) 17:26, 24 January 2019 (UTC)

Improving citations at Mayo Clinic

Hello! I'm Audrey. On behalf of my employer, Mayo Clinic, I offered citations to help correct several sourcing issues at Mayo Clinic. Might editors here care to review? The full request is at Talk:Mayo_Clinic#Improving_citations.

Thanks! Audrey at Mayo Clinic (talk) 13:09, 8 April 2019 (UTC)