Wikipedia talk:COinS

What to use instead of {{chem}} or <chem>?

I'm working through the references on Hydronium and finding several that contain things like {{chem|H|aq|+}} which produces "H⁺
_aq"…which is not easily replicable using just <sub> and <sup>! However, the rubric on {{chem}} says that it should not be used in CS1/2 templates because it pollutes COinS. What is the recommended alternative? TIA HAND —Phil | Talk 18:08, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Alas, not much can be done unless there is a way of writing chemicals as plain text. It used to be that MediaWiki allowed Module:Citation/CS1/COinS to analyze the content of <chem>...</chem> tags so that it could write a text version into the metadata. A change to MediaWiki broke that functionality so the content of <chem>...</chem> tags is not available and renders in the metadata as something like ''?'"`UNIQ--chem-00000009-QINU`"'?'' which is meaningless to those who consume cs1|2 citations via the metadata. More on this in the cs1 archives – a discussion about Math ML, but quite related.

cs1|2 has never been, and probably will never be, able to render clean metadata for {{chem}} simply because that template produces so much html and css. For your example, the {{chem}} template output is:

<span class="chemf nowrap">H<span class="nowrap"><span style="display:inline-block;margin-bottom:-0.3em;vertical-align:-0.4em;line-height:1em;font-size:80%;text-align:left"><sup style="font-size:inherit;line-height:inherit;vertical-align:baseline">+</sup><br /><sub style="font-size:inherit;line-height:inherit;vertical-align:baseline">aq</sub></span></span></span>

Consumers of cs1|2 metadata are then left to decode that on their own.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:53, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Is it impossible to simply strip out the HTML tags from that text (which I have taken the liberty of prettifying to emphasise the tags)? That would at least produce some kind of usable result. I would have thought that would be a fairly basic operation… —Phil | Talk 16:19, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

the COINS warning: where not to use, exactly?

For examplwe {{Val}} has the COINS note saying "not in templates such as CS1". Could it be more specific? Does it include {{#tag:ref|...}}? -DePiep (talk) 10:16, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Format of COinS fields

From information available on Wikipedia it's unclear to me what data format is expected in COinS and therefore what counts as "polluting". At Fin field-effect transistor there is a CS1 citation with |title=Dual-V<sub>th</sub> Independent-Gate FinFETs for Low Power Logic Circuits. This produces rft.atitle=Dual-V%3Csub%3Eth%3C%2Fsub%3E+Independent-Gate+FinFETs+for+Low+Power+Logic+Circuits i.e. the HTML markup is preserved. Is this OK or not? Hairy Dude (talk) 22:15, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Unmaintained standard

@Remsense, hi! It seems to me that it should be explicitly stated that the standard is not used almost anywhere outside of Wikipedia and is not supported by official developers. You can check the official sites and guides: https://ocoins.info/, https://www.oclc.org/research/activities/openurl.html. Iniquity (talk) 17:54, 25 April 2024 (UTC)