Template talk:Citation

Case for continuing to maintain no trailing or internal periods

I'm generally in support of consistency, wherever possible between all the citation formats, and I think some of the recent chages are good, but I have a problem with the trailing period, and this is one area I think the cite family has gone astray. Not all citations are sentences. Some citations are inline, and others are part of the main flow of text. This is particularly true when the full citations appear in footnotes. For example, you may need to be able to make a citation such as the following:

For example, see Smith, John (1996), Flabbergusting for Dummies, New York: Random House, which questions the theory that flabbergusting should be classified as a water sport.

For example, see {{Citation|last=Smith|first=John|title=Flabbergusting for Dummies|year=1996|publisher=Random House|publication-place=New York}}, which questions the theory that flabbergusting should be classified as a water sport.

Citation has lacked a trailing period from the beginning, and this has been an assumption of users using this template, so I have at least temporarily reversed that change pending further discussion on the matter. A lot of citations rely on the fact that there is no trailing period. Also, the internal periods don't seem to be consistent with the use of these citations in an inline manner, either. Thanks to Martin, however, on the other consistency changes, which I think age good.

One possibility might be to switch to some sort of "consistency mode" by use of a parameter, and possibly having a "wrapper" citation template that calls Citation in that consistency mode. COGDEN 16:29, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

When referring to a reference in-line, it is unconventional to cite the full reference, which is usually given in the "references" or "bibliography" section. I don't recall ever seeing this in Wikipedia - can you give some in-article examples of this usage? I would expect to see your example as one of

For example, see Smith (1996), which questions the theory that flabbergusting should be classified as a water sport.

or

For example, see Flabbergusting for Dummies (John Smith, 1996), which questions the theory that flabbergusting should be classified as a water sport.

==References==

• Smith, John (1996), Flabbergusting for Dummies, New York: Random House

Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:05, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

What Martin said. There's really no good reason to be using the full citation template within a full sentence in the article text. (This of course is where the {{Harvnb}} template really shines.) {{Citation}} should have a trailing period. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 11:38, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

I was unhappy this morning to see that the formatting of the refs at Mathematical logic had completely changed. I'm sure that is not the only article that makes the assumption that you can string more after the citation template, like this:

Fraenkel, Abraham A. (1922), "Der Begriff 'definit' und die Unabhängigkeit des Auswahlsaxioms", Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Physikalisch-mathematische Klasse, pp. 253–257 (German), reprinted in English translation as "The notion of 'definite' and the independence of the axiom of choice", van Heijenoort 1976, pp. 284–289.

I would prefer (selfishly) not to have to look through every article I have added citations to in order to remove double periods and correct formatting. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:24, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

What would be the difference between that and the following:

Fraenkel, Abraham A. (1922), "Der Begriff 'definit' und die Unabhängigkeit des Auswahlsaxioms", Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Physikalisch-mathematische Klasse, pp. 253–257 (German). Reprinted in English translation as "The notion of 'definite' and the independence of the axiom of choice", van Heijenoort 1976, pp. 284–289.

Here's how we do something similar (in El Señor Presidente), albeit with cite xxx:

Lorenz, Gunter W. (1994). "Miguel Ángel Asturias with Gunter W. Lorenz (interview date 1970)". Hispanic Literature Criticism. Jelena Krstovic (ed.). Detroit: Gale Research. pp. 159–163. ISBN 0810393751. Excerpted from Lorenz, Gunter W. (Fall, 1975). "Miguel Ángel Asturias with Gunter W. Lorenz". Review (15). Tom J. Lewis (trans.): 5–11. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

Indeed, as far as I'm concerned that's better. (It's certainly closer to the style I know best, the MLA.) --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 11:38, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

A bot could probably get on the case if necessary. Or the closing period of a citation could be removed completely. Or a parameter could declare "final-punctuation = ". What's the best way forwards? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:44, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

"Citation" should not have a trailing period: this is changing functionality in a way that actually does do some harm. I assume the plan is to rewrite "cite-book" to call "Citation/Core", right? Just add the period to that template. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 21:34, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

In addition, using commas rather than periods for separating the clauses of a citation makes more sense in the context of a strung-together citation in the format Carl describes. One could of course use periods and change the gluing text to capitalize "reprinted", but that would entail significant human editing to many articles; I don't think a bot could be trusted for that sort of thing. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

How about a "use-commas" (and maybe also a "show-accessdate") parameter? If requested, a bot could add that to everything that uses "citation", putting things back to how they were; I honestly suspect that in the majority of instances, full stops are more appropriate, but there's no point in upsetting editors when there is a simple workaround. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 09:28, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

That's what I was thinking. We could use a parameter, and then even have a separate "compatibility" template that calls Citation using the parameters. The Citation template could have a use-commas parameter, and then pass a Sep variable to Citation/core. The Sep variable would either be a period or a comma. I think the best permanent solution, though, is to convince the Cite family people to switch to commas. Internal commas, with no trailing period, are the most versatile solution. COGDEN 16:07, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

If, eventually, commas are always to be the separator, then consensus should be gained at WP:Manual of style and WP:Citing sources that citation elements should always be separated by commas. Those two pages are the appropriate place to decide what citation style should be; the templates are the place to implement the decisions. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 16:45, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

How's that? WP:CITE doesn't prefer any particular formatting method:

There are a number of styles used in different fields. They all include the same information but vary in punctuation and the order of the author's name, publication date, title, and page numbers. Any of these styles is acceptable on Wikipedia so long as articles are internally consistent

— Carl (CBM · talk) 18:46, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

If Cite xxx and Citation only support one style, fine, then editors who want to use a different style can't use these templates. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 18:56, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

I thought the whole point of rewriting the templates was to reduce the inconsistency in style among our citations. I have no problem with eventually moving with a style in which we separate everything by periods (as would have the advantage of matching the Chicago Manual of Style), and I don't want to add extra parameters that would encourage editors to use other styles. But I would like to see a clearer plan for getting from where we are now to that more consistent state. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:01, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't have a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, but I have seen purported CMS-compliant citations that use commas. Does CMS really always require periods? I think periods are not a problem so long as you can assume that the only place where a full citation will show up is in a bibliography at the end of the article. Personally, that's how I use Citation, and then I use Harvtxt in footnotes or Harv inline. But some articles put full citations in the footnotes. Maybe the answer might be to have a series of Citation-like templates that are specific the particular citation system you are using, and which assume and require either that the citation appears in a footnote, or at the end in a bibliography. There could be, for example, a Citation-CMS template that 100% conforms to the CMS, and could use periods. There could also be a Citation-BB that conforms to The Blue Book for legal citations, and maybe also a Citation-APA and Citation-MLA. These would all have essentially the same parameters, so it would be easy to switch between several formats. The default Citation would be like the present one, keeping it as general as possible, which would probably mean using commas.

At some point, I think some Wikipedia programmer is going to step up and provide a much better solution to citations in MediaWiki source code, and perhaps a centralized citation database, or an ability to generate a citation based soley on a PMID or ISBN. A few efforts to do this like this one or this one have been started over the last few years, but none has ever taken off. COGDEN 19:22, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

CMoS has two major documentation styles, which it calls "Documentation 1: Notes and Bibliographies" and "Documentation 2: Author-Date Citations and Reference Lists". In the Notes and Bibliographies style, full citations go in footnotes, and commas are used in those footnotes. The biblography is optional, and if present, uses periods. The reference list used in the author-date system uses periods. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 19:43, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

If we all decided to basically just adopt CMS for Citation, we could have the Citation (alias Citation-CMS1) template just follow CMS Documentation 1, and then write a Citation-CMS (alias Citation-CMS2) template that follows Documentation 2. For anything that CMS does not explicitly cover, we could just pick something reasonable. COGDEN 21:27, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I can't imagine Wikipedia editors making a decision about style, or even the style for one template. But if that did happen, it would have still another advantage: when a case comes along that the template can't handle, an editor could just look up what to do in the paper CMoS and format it by hand. There would have to be a few minor changes, for example, Wikipedia does not indent the first line of footnotes, and there is no easy method to do hanging indents in reference lists. Even if it were possible to do these in a template, it should not be done because it would be hard to do by hand. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 22:55, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

We couldn't ever format everything according to CMS specs, but we could follow it's spirit where appropriate. At least we would have a basic standard to refer to in case of any disagreement. There wouldn't have to be Wikipedia-wide agreement, either, just an option for those who want to follow the style. COGDEN 21:26, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Accessdate

Who killed accessdate? It no longer shows at all. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:22, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

See two sections up: #accessdate disappearance, with link to the discussion. —Alex (ASHill | talk | contribs) 02:27, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

issue parameter

For a couple of weeks now, the |issue parameter is no longer displayed correctly in the {{citation}} template, because there is a space lacking before the brackets. See e.g. ref #15 in Unending (the TV Zone one). Nothing major, but if someone with admin powers can fix this, I'd be grateful. – sgeureka ^t•c 19:13, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

This is a consequence of Martin's changes; see #Proposal to merge redundant citation templates. I don't know why he removed the space, or even if he did it on purpose or not, so I'll ask him to comment. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 20:34, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

The Harvard reference style, which this template implicitly uses, does not contain a space before the bracket. It seems bizarre to invent a new style of referencing rather than using a well established standard. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:40, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Which description of the Harvard style are you using? I find it hard to believe that a style guide would recommend us to typeset the reference in Unending that Sgeureka is refering to as it is now. Perhaps I should have explained that the question is about what to do when there is no volume number present. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 20:53, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Ah, okay - I hadn't encountered that layout. Clearly a little change needs making: insert

{{#if:{{{volume|}}}|| }}

just before the bracket, and a space will appear unless a volume is specified. Feel free to make an {{editprotected}} request if that would fix it. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:35, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

{{editprotected}} Request for admin: Please make a change to this template like what Martin suggested right above, resulting in an extra space in desired cases. (Thanks guys.) – sgeureka ^t•c 05:18, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Done. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:38, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

problems for third parties

Third parties have been in the past been known to use template names to work out what kind of cite is being used (it's how we know that that wikipedia cites high impact journals more often than say a typical scientific paper).Geni 22:28, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Huh? Why would you use a different template to cite a paper in Nature than for one in The Unnotable Journal of Inconsequential Science? And why wouldn't such people simply search the source for the phrase "|journal = #####" to generate a list of the journals which have been cited? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:34, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

"Unnotable Journal of Inconsequential Science" is still a formal journal. Things like newspapers and books are not.Geni 23:03, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

But "nature" is a high impact journal, and typical scientific papers probably end up in the "Unnotable Journal of Inconsequential Science". Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 12:48, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Searching the source is not as effective as useing what links here. Then you hit the issues that you already get a fair number of non jounals. Adding to that is not good.Geni 23:05, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Trying to derive conclusions by what template was used great has potential for error. A completely different style of citation may have been used, such as not using any template, using the Citation template, or using the author-date system. Journal articles may be cited with Cite web because an online version is available. Although this problem might be reduced by ignoring the absolute number of citations, and only comparing relative numbers of Cite web, Cite book, Cite news, Cite journal, and so forth, there may be systematic biases such that writers who like to cite high quality journals are more or less likely to use a template in the Cite family than the average editor than editors who do use those tempates. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 23:19, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

The aproach used was to take every use of cite journal, strip out everything that wasn't a journal then count what was left.Geni 23:34, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

If you want, I can have a bot generate a list of every journal name cited and the number of times it is referenced. (A human would still have to identify duplicates such as J. Bot = Journal of Botany" Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 12:48, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

So it's still posible with the changes system? I don't need a practial demonstraition.Geni

yes. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 13:52, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Foreign language sources

In the citation template, is there any way of including the English translation of a reference that is written in another language, or a pointer to the fact that it is not in English? Such as Goethe, J. V., "So schoen ist es am Griebnitzsee" ["Ah, beautiful Griebnitzsee"] (in German). Journal of Things in German, 42 (1989), 56–58? Markus Poessel (talk) 21:05, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Could say something like: Goethe, J. V. (1989), "So schoen ist es am Griebnitzsee", Journal of Things in German, 42: 56–58 (in German, title in English translation: "Ah, beautiful Griebnitzsee"). -- Boracay Bill (talk)

That would of course be a solution, leaving it out of the template altogether. I had hoped there might be a way to include this information with the template data. Markus Poessel (talk) 20:39, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Date format

Why is this template forcing accessdates to the international style, even when the editor enters US style? Articles can't consistently use one style of date formatting if articles written in US English have citation dates written in international style. The template overrides what the editor enters, converting July 23 to 23 July, so editors using this template are forced to manually configure accessdates outside of the template. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:21, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Sandy, this template uses the date template for the access date. There you find an explanation of the formatting. HTH, --EnOreg (talk) 18:58, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, EnOreg; so, we're waiting for a bug to be fixed?

• However, this functionality (not to be confused with wikilinking of dates) is disabled pending resolution of bug #4582. In the meanwhile, 3 August 2024 will display dates in 'day month year' format (e.g. 9 August 2008) for dates between 1970 and 2038.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:01, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Merging

{{editprotected}} Is there any way we can merge all the other "cites" such as cite video, cite podcast, etc.? --I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 17:03, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Did you read #Proposal to merge redundant citation templates? The consensus seems to be to maintain separate templates, but to strive for consistency. --Karnesky (talk) 17:43, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Cite audio has no equivalent at "citation". This has been causing problems at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/1964 Gabon coup d'état. I propose we add these features. --I'm an Editorofthewiki^{[citation needed]} 23:28, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Edit request disabled. Please only use this when you're ready for an admin to make an edit. --- RockMFR 01:53, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

COinS

Resolved

The COinS metadata[1] see to be missing the rft.series data corresponding to the series parameter. For example

• {{citation|first=A.D.|last=Aleksandrov|authorlink=Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov|first2=V.A.|last2=Zalgaller|title=Instrinsic Geometry of Surfaces|volume =15|series=Translations of Mathematical Monographs|publisher= American Mathematical Society|year=1967}}

has

• <span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.title=Instrinsic Geometry of Surfaces&rft.aulast=Aleksandrov&rft.aufirst=A.D.&rft.date=1967&rft.volume=15&rft.pub=American Mathematical Society">

It seems like all that is needed is

{{#if: {{{Series|}}} |&rft.series={{urlencode:{{{Series}}}}} }}

but I'm hesitant about editing a high use template. --Salix alba (talk) 14:12, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

interwiki link

{{Editprotected}}

I'd like to add the link fr:Modèle:Citation Wikipédia anglaise to the template, thanks. Mro (talk) 14:43, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Done. For future reference, the interwiki links are in Template:Citation/doc, which is not protected, so you can do it yourself. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 17:28, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

format parameter

The format parameter doesn't appear to be documented, or am I just not seeing it? --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 17:43, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Citation until somewhat recently was incompatible with cite journal, and that was part of a somewhat recent string of additions that perhaps never got documented (and yes, that was how we ended up with the PDF issue at Johnson, when someone insisted that we use this inferior template, which has now been somewhat corrected :-) I suggest seeing the complete documentation at cite journal. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:50, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The Johnson question was what prompted me to look at this template's source code, as you probably guessed. Actually though, I quite like this template, even if its documentation isn't entirely up-to-date. :-) --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 17:57, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Harvnb and this template not playing well together

... in the article Harry Murray the {{Harvnb}}s aren't playing well with the {{Citation}}s. Links don't work, since the former are (for example) linking to CITEREFFrankiSlatyer2003 and the latter to CITEREF_Franki_Slatyer_2003.... any thoughts? Ling.Nut ^{(talk—WP:3IAR)} 04:11, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

The {{Citation}}s in that article had e.g., ref=CITEREF_Franki_Slatyer_2003 parameters specified which forced that. I removed these. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 04:31, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

<smacks forehead> I hereby lose my status as a man who has a firm grasp of the obvious. Thanks for the looksee. Ling.Nut ^{(talk—WP:3IAR)} 04:35, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Bug?

There seems to be a problem with the new "format" parameter, in that it does not display the format unless the "periodical" parameter is also set. Here's an example, which contains two {{citation}}s to web sites. Neither display the pdf format unless the periodical parameter is added. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 18:29, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the problem is that the 'Anything else with a title, including books' section of citation/core doesn't mention the format parameter, but does mention the URL parameter. I don't have time to test any changes right now, but adding a format parameter to that section should fix the bug. That section also seems to be missing the language parameter. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:24, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

COINS error

Resolved

{{Editprotected}}

There's a small bug in the COINS tag generation;

{{{Journal|}}}

should be replaced with

{{{Publication|}}}

where it appears in Template:Citation/core (1 occurrence).

Thanks,

Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:57, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

And another one...

{{Editprotected}}

Multiple authors ought to be listed in the COINS information. The correct format, as listed at http://generator.ocoins.info/ , would be generated by replacing

    {{
      #if: {{{Surname1|}}} |&rft.aulast={{urlencode:{{{Surname1}}}}}
    }}{{
      #if: {{{Given1|}}} |&rft.aufirst={{urlencode:{{{Given1}}}}}
    }}

with

   {{
     #if: {{{Surname1|}}} |&rft.au={{urlencode:{{{Surname1}}}}}
     {{
       #if: {{{Given1|}}} |{{urlencode:,{{{Given1}}}}}&rft.aufirst={{urlencode:{{{Given1}}}}}&rft.aulast={{urlencode:{{{Surname1}}}}}
     }}
   }}
   {{
     #if: {{{Surname2|}}} |&rft.au={{urlencode:{{{Surname2}}}}}
     {{
       #if: {{{Given2|}}} |{{urlencode:, {{{Given2}}}}}
     }}
   }}

(in Template:Citation/core).

I'd be grateful if somebody could make that change. Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:11, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I've updated the Coins meta data. Changes

• Changed the #if: {{{Journal|}}} to #if: {{{Periodical|}}}
• Periodicals now have info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal
• rft.jtitle,rft.atitle used for journals, rft.btitle,rft.atitle used for books. As opposed to rft.title
• Authors upto 9 listes in rft.au
• added rft.series tag when needed for books in series
• {{{Place}}} no longer used, as duplicated
• rft_id=info:doi/{{urlencode:{{{doi}}}}} used instead of rft_id=info:doi/{{urlencode:{{{DOI}}}}} as Template:Citation passes doi rather than DOI to Citation/core. This seems to go agains the general capitilisation scheme, and theres also some code in core which used DOI for something.
• rft_id=info:bibcode, and rft_id=info:oclcnum tags added when available
• added and rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:{{FULLPAGENAMEE}} so source is visable

Also correct capitilisation of Bibcode in the main part of the template. There are still some bugs if people include links [[Cambridge University Press]] in the publisher then the square brackets get passed through, which is sub-optimal. The rft.genre is only one of book, bookitem or article. The proceeding and other genera don't get passed in. --Salix alba (talk) 23:40, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Wonderful, thanks so much. Now my Endnote plugin will work properly! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:20, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Period, not comma

There should be a period after the author and date, not a comma. Can this be fixed? Badagnani (talk) 07:10, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

origyear

Template:Cite book allows for origyear parameter. Can this be added to Template:Citation as well? — ¾-10 16:37, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Can somebody unlink dates in the citation template?

Resolved

 – Discussion centralized at Wikipedia talk:Citation templates#De-linking dates

Hi, per MOS:UNLINKDATES, can somebody fix the citation templates so that autoformatted dates aren't automatically linked in the references? Thanks, NJGW (talk) 04:48, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I can't really see consensus for the proposal. Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Archive 110 end up with a proposal for mass unlinking to stop. And the revsion history of MOS:DATE is far to active to say the this matter is settled. --Salix alba (talk) 05:43, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't see that there... all I see is disagreement on how to get dates to show up properly. Can you quote me the part you're talking about? NJGW (talk) 05:54, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

It looks like there is nothing to do in the template code. The formatting of dates is basically just what is used in the date= and accessdate= parameters. --Salix alba (talk) 06:34, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

How are the appearance of those parameters changed? NJGW (talk) 06:36, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

It all depends on parameters passed in. with accessdate = 2008-01-28 | date=1851-01-28

Turner, O. (1851-01-28), History of the Pioneer Settlement, William Alling, retrieved 2008-01-28{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

with accessdate = [[January 28]] [[2008]] | date = [[January 28]] [[1851]]

Turner, O. (January 28 1851), History of the Pioneer Settlement, William Alling, retrieved January 28 2008 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)

with accessdate = [[28 January]] [[2008]] | date = [[28 January]] [[1851]]

Turner, O. (28 January 1851), History of the Pioneer Settlement, William Alling, retrieved 28 January 2008 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)

exact output depends on your preferences. --Salix alba (talk) 07:09, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

What I mean is, how is the global output changed? I realize input affects it, but for any given input of one parameter, where would one go to change the output? NJGW (talk) 07:14, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

When logged-in as NJGW, you should see a line like

NJGW My talk My preferences My watchlist My contributions Log out

at the top-right of the web page. Click My preferences. On the page which that brings up, click the Date and time tab. -- Boracay Bill (talk) Boracay Bill (talk) 07:27, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

That's really not the question I'm asking. As you know, Ohconfucius claims to dislike using cite templates because they causes formatted dates to show up as links in the reference section. I'm wondering how this is handled (the prefs you pointed me to only show the date format, nothing about linking). NJGW (talk) 07:31, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

et al

With more than three authors, a patent template (see example on documentation page) produces

Degermark, Mikael; Andrej Brodnik & Svante Carlsson et al.,

Isn't the ampersand is redundant if et al. is included, and shouldn't et al. should be italicised?

Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:38, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

options for archive-url and archive-data

This has been discussed already ([2]), but no concensus seems to have been reached. In short, a feature to add a second url to an archived (wayback archive, webcite or similar) copy of a cited webpage is requested. This exists already for the Template:web cite template. One wikipedian was against adding this feature (see previous discussion) because, in his opinion, only the archived webpage should be referenced, since this is the "most stable" copy. I strongly disagree with this opinion, and I think it is important to be able to link the original url as well as a copy. Why? It is normal scientific practice to refer the original work, not a quote of it. However, giving an additional backup solution is valuable in the moment the original work changes or merely disappears. Besides, trusting the archive alone is also dangerous. Another wikipedian has already implemented this feature in User:RossPatterson/Citation. What are the views on this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nillerdk (talk • contribs) 15:56, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Since Nillerdk mentioned it, I'll point out that User:RossPatterson/Citation is stale - an experiment from some time back. But I'd be happy to re-implement the change if consensus approves. RossPatterson (talk) 22:13, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Just piping up to mention that the wording of the resulting formatted cite can get messy when both the url and contribution-url (AKA chapter-url) parameters are used and either or both of those go to dead links which are available in the archive. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 01:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Can you generate an example of just how messy it would be? In any case, it is up to the editor to judge which parameters are neccesary for a particular citation. Have a look a RossPatterson's examples here. That's how I would like to use Template:Citation and I don't find his layout messy. Can anyone support me in my opinion that we should never rely solely on an url of an archived copy, but always specify the original url - whether or not the original is still available? Nils Emil (talk) 11:18, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

OK. something like this:

• {{Citation |last=Smith |first=John |author2=Jane Doe |author3=Bonnie Brown |editor=John Witherspoon |title=A book about something |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=ABcdefg |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/*/books.google.com/books?id=ABcdefg/readfile?fk_files=12345&pageno=67 |archive-date=12 January 2006 |chapter=III. A chapter about some particular bit of something |chapter-url=http://www.gutenberg.org/somepage |archive-chapter-url=http://web.archive.org/web/*/books.google.com/books?id=ABcdefg /readfile?fk_files=8901234&pageno=56 |chapter-archive-date=23 February 2006 |pages=78-90 |publisher=Macmillan |year=2001 |isbn=1234567890 }}

Could produce something like this:

• Smith, John; Jane Doe & Bonnie Brown (2001), "III. A chapter about some particular bit of something" (archived from the original on 23 February 2006), in John Witherspoon, "A book about something" (archived from the original on 12 January 2006), Macmillan, pp. 78-90, ISBN 1234567890

Regarding preserving info about the original links, there has been a discussion about that recently (which I failed tofind on a quick search) where it was argued that it is good practice to always cite the original source, even if that source has become unavailable and the editor is now relying on a purportedly true copy of the original source. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 00:21, 30 September 2008 (UTC) (updated by Boracay Bill (talk) 02:12, 1 October 2008 (UTC))

I think for citations to books it's best just to include the ISBN and not try to provide URLs. From the ISBN it's easy enough to get to Google books etc. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:08, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

... if there is an ISBN. It may be that some books available online are isbn-less, e.g. The Development of Philippine Politics (1872-1920) By Maximo Manguiat Kalaw, which I have cited elsewhere as:

• Kalaw, Maximo Manguiat (1927), "V. The Katipunan revolt under Bonifacio and Aguinaldo", The Development of Philippine Politics, Oriental commercial, pp. 69–98, retrieved 2008-02-07

or it may be that the citation is of a page on a website where it is appropriate to name both the website-title and the website-section-title in the cite. In any case, the topic of discussion in this section is what support, if anything, {{Citation}} should provide for archived links, not about how editors might properly use {{Citation}}. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 02:38, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the example, which I don't find too messy. Citations are not prose, but technical information you need for verifying or clarifying something. It's ok. In the case of books, which are less unlikely to disappear, the archive option might be less useful (but why not provide it and leave it to the editor to judge?). For quoting websites of companies, ministeries and the like, the archive option is IMHO very important as it is only a matter of time (weeks, months, ...) before they change the website layout rendering the original link broken. Now, are there any negative side-effets of adding the archive-functionality as an option for the editor? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nillerdk (talk • contribs) 07:49, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, there seem to be no strong opinions on this. As it is nothing controversial, and it doesn't change the behaviour of the template if the archive-options are not used, I would like to ask RossPatterson to bring his stale sandbox-edition up to date and have his edits included in the Citation-template afterwords. Nils Emil (talk) 05:55, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Will do. Watch This Space. RossPatterson (talk) 00:28, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I have an updated version of this template and /core at User:RossPatterson/Citation and User:RossPatterson/Citation/core that adds:

• |archive-url= for the "whole" citation URL
• |archive-chapter-url= and |archive-contribution-url= for the "part of the whole" citation URL
• |archivechapterurl= for the "part of the whole" citation URL to match the undocumented |chapterurl=, but I suggest it too remain undocumented or be removed
• |archive-date= for the "whole" date of archival
• |archive-chapter-date= and |archive-contribution-date= for the "part of the whole" archival date
• (|archivechapterdate= for the "part of the whole" archival date to match the undocumented |chapterurl=, but I suggest it too remain undocumented or be removed

It passes Boracay Bill's "John Smith" test case above, albeit slightly altered, as well as all a few I constructed myself and a lot of "normal" cases I found (see User:RossPatterson/Citation/tests, especially User:RossPatterson/Citation/tests#Cases from other sources). Here's that particular test case:

• {{User:RossPatterson/Citation |last=Smith |first=John |author2=Jane Doe |author3=Bonnie Brown |editor=John Witherspoon |title=A book about something |url=http://books.google.com/books?id=ABcdefg |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/*/books.google.com/books?id=ABcdefg/readfile?fk_files=12345&pageno=67 |archive-date=12 January 2006 |chapter=III. A chapter about some particular bit of something |chapter-url=http://www.gutenberg.org/somepage |archive-chapter-url=http://web.archive.org/web/*/books.google.com/books?id=ABcdefg /readfile?fk_files=8901234&pageno=56 |archive-chapter-date=23 February 2006 |pages=78-90 |publisher=Macmillan |year=2001 |isbn=1234567890 }}

RossPatterson (talk) 22:52, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Multiple citations from a year

How can we use the #citeref function of Template:Harvnb, etc, to link to mulitple citation from a single year with the same author? In my case they are newspaper and magazine articles. The standard in parenthetical referencing is (Smith 2008a)(Smith 2008b) and the citation template has no trouble with that. But I don't see how to force the #citeref to be Smith2008a. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 22:19, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Use e.g. {{Harvnb|Smith|2008|Ref=CITEREFSmith2008a}} paired with {{Citation |... |ref=CITEREFSmith2008a}} (note uppercase 'R' in {{Harvnb}}, etc.)-- Boracay Bill (talk) 01:38, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! ·:· Will Beback ·:· 01:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

You should not have to "force" #citeref to be 'Smith2008a'. It will be that automatically when your reference is {{harvnb|Smith|2008a}}.

And, when you have '(Smith 2008a)(Smith 2008b)' you should also have {{citation}} reflecting year=2008a, year=2008b. The #citerefs will then also automatically match.

In other words, use year= and optionally date=, but not date= alone. The a/b/c/etc obviously can't be inferred from a date=. -- Fullstop (talk) 12:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I tried doing that, but if there is a date then it ignores the year field. Since some of the citations are newspapers, they have full dates. I'm doing a test in my sandbox, User:Will Beback/Sandbox. Feel free to edit it. Maybe I just have a typo in there. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 06:36, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

With a little more jiggling I think I got it to work. I'll try it out in the article, Millennium '73. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 06:56, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that did the trick. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:58, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Need agency= field for news sources

The agency= parameter was added to the {{cite news}} template to capture and properly format the news agency (e.g. Associated Press, Reuters, etc.) in news stories. It also needs to be added here. It appears after the quoted title, but before the italicized work in the standard typeface. Dhaluza (talk) 00:39, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Since it is sometimes the only source listed for an article, should it be used as the author if there are no other author names in the template? ·:· Will Beback ·:· 00:58, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

For one, that doesn't work when the name of the author is known (e.g. for a syndicated column). Secondly, it is not formally correct to do that (one would minimally need something like "AP staff writer").

I don't think it is particularly useful to know that article "foo" in publication bar was originally from a wire agency. After all, it is 'foo in bar' that is being cited. Also, the original wire story might be different from what is actually being cited.

However, there are other circumstances where an "x"** field might be necessary, and such a field could also be used for agency=. I've recommended such a field before, so here goes again. :) -- Fullstop (talk) 13:44, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
** Whatever the generic name for such a field might be; [contribution-]type =, -object =, -class =, -container =, -format =, -media = ... whatever.

According to Wiki Answers the wire service should not be entered in the author field (also many wire service stories have authors as stated above). Dhaluza (talk) 22:44, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Right. As I said, "its not formally correct to do that."

Anyway... notwithstanding that the name of an agency is not particularly useful (it does not help to find the cited source), nor is it a good idea (for reasons mentioned above),... what should a generic field (to encompass 'agency' and the other things mentioned) be named? Or put in another way: since any chapter/contribution within a greater work can theoretically stand alone, what "tag" of a stand-alone work corresponds to the desired tag of the chapter/contribution (within a work)? -- Fullstop (talk) 17:38, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I disagree that the agency is not useful. First, if the source is a wireservice, and the story just happened to be cited from a particular newspaper, that is relevant (i.e. that the story was not written by a local reporter, and the author actually works for the agency). Also for WP purposes, in particular WP:N, multiple stories from the same wire service are considered to be from the same source. A wireservice may be considered a more reliable source in certain cases as well. Regarding your specific comment on usefulness, it certainly does help to find a cited source when the original linked content goes missing, but another work using the same material can be found. Dhaluza (talk) 01:16, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Dhaluza's points. Also, the anonymous Wiki Answers page doesn't seem definitive. While the MLA may have its standards, for WP purposes more information is better. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 01:46, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

(outdent)

*sigh* The beginner's guide to citation...

• The purpose of a citation is to lead the reader as close as possible to the source being cited. A citation has no other purpose. A citation is not itself a source, nor is it an essay about the source. A citation is an identifier that tells the reader how to find the source that the writer used. Anything that does not contribute to that end is -- at best -- meaningless fluff. At worst, non-contributory information can even be counter-productive since it is liable to mislead or distract from the purpose of a citation.
• An editor needs to cite the source that is in his/her possession. Without also possessing the wire service article, an editor cannot guarantee that a newspaper reproduces exactly the same text, or with the same title. But if an editor were to also possess the wire service article, then the wire service could be cited directly.
  Providing the name of an agency is like providing the name of the publisher of a previous edition. Since its not the source being used, it is also not pertinent to a citation of it.

-

• Addressing Will Beback's "for WP purposes more information is better"...
  "for WP purposes more information is better" is simply not true. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collector of information, and the purpose of proper citation is no different on WP than it is elsewhere. "More information" does not pass Occam's razor; citations are precision tools with a single purpose. They are not mini-encyclopedias of their own. If it helps, one can think of a citation as the address of a house. It is possible to add an awful lot of information to an address, such as who built the house. But to find the correct house it is not useful to know who built the house, and such extraneous information will only hamper the courier who comes around for pickup.
• Addressing Dhaluza's notes on WP:N/WP:RS...
  WP:N/WP:RS has bearing on sources, not on citations. A citation is merely a pointer to a source, not a source itself. A citation cannot by itself enhance or reduce the notability of a topic or the reliability of a source. Such a step requires evaluation of the source by editor(s). Such an evaluation (or the negotiation thereof) also belongs in talk space; it is OR when it appears in article space, and it certainly should not be expressed as an "approval" tag in a citation.
  As far as the relationship of WP:N to citations is concerned: no one can be compelled to provide the name of an agency, so WP:N cannot be inferred from how many times the name of an agency appears in a list of citations. Ergo, the WP:N angle is moot.
  As far as the relationship of WP:RS to citations is concerned: the objective benchmark of the reliability of a citation is whether the citation succeeds in leading the reader to the source being cited. A citation is reliable if it succeeds in doing just that, and unreliable if it fails to do just that.

But all this is completely beside the point. I have twice posted questions (above) that require some thought about how such a field might be generically implemented. Whether an editor then chooses to turn a citation into a mini-essay about the source is up to him/her. That they can also do without abusing a citation template. -- Fullstop (talk) 00:24, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Taken literally, your first claim (that everything unnecessary for finding the source should be omitted) would imply that we should replace many instances of {{citation}} by a bare DOI link. I don't think we want to take it that far... —David Eppstein (talk) 00:29, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

(ec) Heh. That isn't a literal interpretation. Its a machine-centric and web-centric interpretation. A digital object identifier (with or without URL-ization) is to a machine what a fully qualified citation is to a literate human being. They accomplish the same thing, which is to find an object. One way using a machine, and another using a human brain. But even iff human beings were capable of making sense of machine-readable addressing, a human-readable form would be redundant, but not de trop. But, no, we don't want to go so far as to assume that humans can make sense of "10.1000/182" (or any other kind of machine-target addressing). But this too is rather OT. -- Fullstop (talk) 02:13, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Information that appears in citations does more than help the reader find the source. It also tells the reader about the source. Knowing that an article came from a wire service helps the reader evaluate its credibility, and helps other editors decide on its reliability. I don't see a reason to exclude the information if it's available. All it means is adding another field to the template. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 01:59, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

How about, um, reading the last paragraph of what I wrote before? -- Fullstop (talk) 02:13, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, the Wikianswer link you provided suggests placing the wire service after the article title and before the periodical name. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 02:21, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, yes. But what is the generic name of the slot "after-the-title-and-before-the-periodical-name" (which in this template's parlance is actually "after-the-chapter/contribution-and-before-the-title")?

Periodicals aka Journals aka Newspapers aka Magazines are only one of the citation "types" that this template takes care of. So, if we are inventing something new, it should be done in a fashion that it can be used generically too.

I have already listed [contribution-]type =, -object =, -class =, -container =, -format =, -media =. An -x-info ala mail headers also comes to mind. Any more suggestions? -- Fullstop (talk) 03:48, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Will Beback that the citation is not simply to tell the reader how to find the source. If that were the case a bare DOI would suffice. We also cite to credit the original author. In this case the wireservice is part of the authorship--it is the writer's employer and the source of its credibility, probably to an even greater extent than the editors of the work in which it is published. For purposes of WP:V, WP:NPOV, and WP:RS we also use the citations to judge the credibility and bias of the source, and even to judge the WP:Notability of the subject. Dhaluza (talk) 11:20, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Wtf? Been there, done it all. Are my responses invisible or something? If not, could you please try to say something that has not been responded to already? It would be a really cool if such a response also actually went somewhere. For instance, if it followed the one immediately before yours, or the third before yours, or the fifth before yours, or the seventh before yours. That would be very nice. Thanks. -- Fullstop (talk) 13:26, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh, are you only allowed to respond to the last poster? I didn't know that. I thought you were supposed to bottom post and indent to indicate what item you are responding to. Dhaluza (talk) 02:06, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

"Wireservice " would seem like a reasonable name for the slot. And let's not get heated about this. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:36, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

The WP article on this subject is titled: News agency. I believe this is a more generic term, and less archaic than "wireservice" since the wires have mostly been replaced with fiber-optic communication anyway. Dhaluza (talk) 07:09, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Even better. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 07:30, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Archive

Shouldn't this template get the two parameter

{{cite Citation
...
  | archiveurl  = 
  | archivedate = 
...
}}

as in {{Cite web}}? Nsaa (talk) 11:35, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. See above: "options for archive-url and archive-data". User:RossPatterson is working on it. Nils Emil (talk) 10:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Minor changes possible as result of update of Template:Cite journal

Please check that there are no bugs in Template:Citation/sandbox, in the unlikely event that changes to the citation architecture arising from updates to Template:Cite journal have significant effects on this template's output. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 18:21, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

{{editprotected}}

As no bugs have been reported, could an admin please make the following changes? (Also requested at Template talk:Cite journal, duplicated here for completeness.

• Replace Template:Cite journal with Template:Cite journal/sandbox
• Replace Template:Citation/core with Template:Citation/core/sandbox
• Replace Template:Citation with Template:Citation/sandbox

This will ensure that Citation is unaffected by a couple of minor changes in the Citation/core which were necessary for integration with Template:Cite journal. Thank you, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:33, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

 Done (all 3) SkierRMH (talk) 03:57, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 04:44, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

I think there may be a bug. See below. Please undo. Many thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 06:04, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Note - all three were reverted SkierRMH (talk) 06:11, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 06:52, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

I've now created a Template:Citation/testcases page which compares live version with sandbox version. Note that the transcluded link in Template:Citation/sandbox need to be changed from {{Citation/core/sandbox}} to {{Citation/core}} when copying. There still seem to be some bugs in the testcases. --Salix (talk): 08:18, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

I think I've found the bug. Bug we do need more testing before it goes live. --Salix (talk): 09:07, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Everything seems fine to me. What further testing do you have in mind, given that the process has been going on for several months? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:50, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Can you point to the discussion and the testing that has taken place so far over these several months? Many thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 03:48, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

See here and here. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:23, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Everything seemed fine to you before, and it wasn't. Meanwhile, why now are co-authors and co-editors to be separated by semi-colons? Certainly worse than the current situation. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 22:23, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

 Done there may be some punctuation issues. Please discuss below #punctuation. --Salix (talk): 02:39, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Why OCLC?

My attention was attracted by this edit of User:Citation bot, where it adds an OCLC number to a book whose ISBN is already mentioned (incidentally, I'm grateful for the work that Martin = Smith609 is doing with Citation bot). I am wondering what the use of the OCLC number is. The link goes to an entry in WorldCat, but that same entry can also be found via the ISBN. I did not find any discussion of the OCLC in the archives on this page. It seems to have been copied from Template:Cite book, and there is some discussion on Template talk:Cite book/Archive 4#COinS tags for machine-readable metadata but not really on the reason for adding this information. One relevant comment, by User:Circeus: "LCCNs and OCLC numbers only become relevant for books without ISBN, and they aren't that commonly used as references." If that's true, should we recommend that LCCNs and OCLC numbers are only used for books without ISBN? -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:41, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Independent of whether an OCLC should be available in the COinS metadata, OCLC numbers should only be a fallback on screen and in print, and appear only when there is no ISBN. E.g. in ./Core change

#if: {{{OCLC|}}} to #ifeq: {{{ISBN|{{{OCLC|-}}}}}}|{{{OCLC|}}}

The same sort of cascade could probably also be applied to [(coden)->issn->]bibcode->pubmed->(sici)->doi. For example,...

for pubmed #ifeq: {{{DOI|{{{SICI|{{{PMID|{{{Bibcode|{{{ISSN|{{{CODEN|-}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}|{{{PMID|}}}

for bibcode #ifeq: {{{DOI|{{{SICI|{{{PMID|{{{Bibcode|{{{ISSN|{{{CODEN|-}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}|{{{Bibcode|}}}

This way, Citation bot can non-destructively complement a PMID (or whatever) with a DOI.

Incidentally, a bot cannot reliably infer an OCLC without also knowing the ISBN.

-- Fullstop (talk) 14:28, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

We should not have hidden parameters in the citatioins. If the OCLC is included in the COinS metadata, it should be visible so it can be checked and edited. If the OCLC is redundant with the ISBN, then I'm not sure we need to add it at all where we already have the ISBN. Dhaluza (talk) 02:31, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Just so long as we don't lose OCLC entirely. I just came across several books that don't have ISBNs. Having both may be redundant, but it's harmless. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 03:54, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It would be helpful if a consensus could be reached and reported in the template documentation. If OCLCs aren't useful when a book has an ISBN, then the Citation bot is wasting a lot of resources by adding them. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:18, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

1. There is consensus that OCLCs are superfluous when ISBNs are available.

• The bot can/should to be told to stop doing adding OCLCs when ISBNs are available. Bots can be told to stop doing something irrespective of whether it is reported in documentation or not: We can't preempt in documentation everything that a bot can do, and besides, bots don't read documentation, and (theoretically) bot ops can't/shouldn't be expected to keep track of changes to template docs.
• Moreover, inferring OCLCs from the available ISBNs is not only unnecessary, it is reinventing the wheel. Worldcat lookup is the very first entry in the "Online databases" list provided by Mediawiki's ISBN handler (Special:BookSources).

2. There is also consensus that templates "ignore" OCLCs (or whatever) when ISBNs are (or become) available.

• <quote>This way, Citation bot [(or editors)] can non-destructively complement [an existing OCLC] (or whatever) with [an ISBN] (or whatever).</quote>
  Here, "non-destructively" means: without removal of existing information [i.e. OCLC, LCCN], even when these have been superseded by an ISBN.

Martin: for a start, just re-configure the bot to stop adding OCLCs when ISBNs are already present. If anything (but don't!), it should try to find ISBNs for OCLCs or LCCNs or whatever. It could perhaps fix ISBN numbers though (hyphenate, shorten 978-s, check length/checksum). -- 22:38, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your summary. I know that in a similar debate about journal articles, I considered adding a PMID superfluous when a DOI was present, but was convinced otherwise. I've stopped the bot adding OCLCs altogether (as it could only work them out from an ISBN); should it remove OCLCs when an ISBN is specified, to remove clutter from the page code? I must admit I had assumed from the presence of the question that it wasn't answered in the documentation; I try not to set my bots onto things that there's not consensus for and the doc is usually the easiest place to find such consensus. If you could give me a list of "fixes" to be made for ISBNs, and specific rules I can convert to code (e.g. where the dashes should go), I'd be happy to implement them. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 00:22, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Missing space between written at location and article title plus date format confused

For example: {{citation | title = Article Title | periodical = Periodical Name | publication-date = [[December 5]] [[1910]] | date = [[December 4]] [[1910]] | place = Location | publication-place = Publication Place }} results in: written at Location, "Article Title", Periodical Name, Publication Place (published December 5 1910), December 4 1910 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= and |publication-date= (help)

See how we get 'written at Location"Article Title"' instead of 'written at Location "Article Title"'.

Additionally, the presence of periodical appears to mess up the date and publication date as it looks better when I omit the periodical like this: {{citation | title = Article Title | publication-date = [[December 5]] [[1910]] | date = [[December 4]] [[1910]] | place = Location | publication-place = Publication Place }} results in: written at Location, Article Title, Publication Place (published December 5 1910), December 4 1910 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= and |publication-date= (help)

WilliamKF (talk) 20:47, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

The simplest fix is to use the "book" parameter in place of "periodical". Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 00:24, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

written at Location, Article Title, Publication Place (published December 5 1910), December 4 1910 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= and |publication-date= (help); Unknown parameter |book= ignored (help)

Unfortunately that does not work for some periodical only fields as they are now ignored with the book version (i.e. publication-place and issue - even Periodical Name for book is missing?):

Author (December 4 1910), "Article Title", written at Location, Periodical Name, vol. 60, Publication Place (published December 5 1910) {{citation}}: |author= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |date= and |publication-date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)

versus using periodical:

Author (December 4 1910), written at Location, "Article Title", Periodical Name, vol. 60, no. 19, 308, Publication Place (published December 5 1910) {{citation}}: |author= has generic name (help); Check date values in: |date= and |publication-date= (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)

WilliamKF (talk) 04:24, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

I can't think when one would want to use both place and publication place when citing a periodical publication in practise. (gosh that was uncomfortably alliterative!) I'd find it useful if you could give me an example of an actual citation where this is causing a problem; then I might be able to suggest an appropriate solution. Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:34, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

PS adding an author and using appropriate parameter names appears to resolve the issue; I've done this with your examples above (dif). And I've never seen a book with an "issue number". If that answers your question you may consider updating the documentation to clarify the issue. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:39, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Please see this issue in the article Mary Baker Eddy with references 13, 14, and 16 which I have now adapted per your suggestion which seems to avoid the problem now. The publication place is where the periodical is published and the place is where the article was written. So for example, NY Times is published in NYC but a particular article might be written from London. So if pushed, one could drop the publication-place, although, to me this seems part of the citation, the city where published as opposed to the city where written. WilliamKF (talk) 02:34, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Parallel activity

Editors here may be interested in Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Merging the zillions citation templates out there and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Comments (templates merger) on a new Citation template that would putatively replace all the Cite family.LeadSongDog (talk) 16:58, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

"Wiki-magic"?

Plasticup has been removing links from dates in {{Citation}} and {{Cite xxx}} templates, with the edit summary "fixing the "date=" fields to allow wiki-magic using AWB". The result is that dates in these citation templates currently display in ISO 8601 format (e.g., "1968-08-01"). When queried on his talk page by another editor about this, Plasticup said that wiki-magic "allows the citation template [to] set the date format, rather than forcing it into ISO 8601 format. Some citation templates do not yet parse their input and translate it into International or American format, but they will in time". Are the citation templates indeed being developed to do this, and if so when is this "wiki-magic" feature likely to be implemented? What should editors do in the meantime – continue to link dates, remove links from dates, or present dates in a non-ISO format (e.g., "1 August 1968" or "August 1, 1968")? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 14:48, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Removing the current format before having a new system in place to convert the dates to a user's "preferred date format" seems more than a little "bass-ackwards" to me! Perhaps we could make it a priority to fix the templates, as Plasticup has already modified a large number of articles, which are now showing dates only in ISO 8601 format. And I see I'm not alone in my concern... MeegsC | Talk 15:15, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Also of relevance to this discussion is the recent change to the MOS: "The linking of dates purely for the purpose of autoformatting is now deprecated". Plasticup ^T/C 15:59, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

On the other hand, "Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Dates" says: "YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and are generally not used in Wikipedia." I have no problem if the removal of the links from such dates in citation templates is specifically to facilitate the implementation of some feature that will automatically display YYYY-MM-DD dates according to readers' preferences (is that what "wiki-magic" is? I'm still in the dark about the exact meaning of this term), and the feature is going to be introduced shortly. However, I have to say I haven't seen any discussion of the matter on this talk page. If the "wiki-magic" feature is a remote possibility or only something desirable that no one is working on, I would suggest that links not be removed from YYYY-MM-DD dates for the time being until more is known about what is to happen. Or should editors start transforming those dates into the "1 August 1968"/"August 1, 1968" format? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 17:39, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

And considering that the "|accessdate=| parameter won't accept anything but YYYY-MM-DD format, it means I can't clearly show that the accessdate is October 1 rather than 10 January. Yes, if you're "in the know", you understand that dates are displayed that way. But considering that a vast proportion of the world isn't used to seeing dates in that order, it makes things more than a little (unnecessarily) confusing! This needs to be fixed! If the concern is "excessive, unneeded blue links", then some other mechanism that does the date formatting without colouring the affected dates sould be found. MeegsC | Talk 17:44, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I've noticed that if I use {{Citation}} and just indicate the access date without a link (e.g., "accessdate=2008-10-23"), the template does something wonderful (magic?) and on my computer it displays in the "1 August 1968" format, which is what I've set my date preference to. (Not sure if this works for the {{cite xxx}} range of templates.) If it can be done for "accessdate", it should be possible for "date" as well. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 17:52, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Note that neither the cite xxx templates nor the citation template check to see that dates of the form YYYY-MM-DD comply with ISO 8601 and that the history of the usage of that form on Wikipedia suggests that violations of the standard are very likely. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:59, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

• Please loose the linking. I currently have to do work-arounds with the {cite} template to avoid the links to trivia that too few readers actually read. Greg L (talk) 20:02, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Greg L, I've seen your arguments against date linking in other places. Because I'm curious, can you tell me what the source is for your knowledge of readership numbers for date or year articles? — Bellhalla (talk) 23:04, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

• Page views can be found at stats.grok.se. but of course readership isn't related to relevance; it is very rare for the events of a year to be relevant to a citation. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:29, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
  • I agree that wikilinked dates in a citation would rarely be relevant. I was mainly asking because Greg L seems to trot out the "no ones reads date articles anyway" card in relation to linking dates in other contexts. Apart from being a case of WP:IDONTLIKEIT on Greg's part, I was just curious as to what evidence he has to support his contention that "too few readers actually read" them. — Bellhalla (talk) 04:11, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Things all seem to hinge on Bug 4582 Provide preference-based autoformatting for unlinked dates. I feel we'll be ain a limbo state until that is resolved. --Salix (talk): 23:48, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can tell this whole date delinking push started because some people got sick of waiting for that bug to be resolved. Then others jumped on the bandwagon, of course. BTW, to the original poster, the "wiki magic" isn't likely to respect your date prefs; judging by what I've seen elsewhere from those pushing this whole date mess through it'll probably default to "magicking" it to DMY format, with a parameter to make it do MDY format instead. I personally prefer the shorter YMD format (which is not necessarily ISO, BTW) in the reference list, but I know no one cares about that. Anomie⚔ 02:02, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Right ... So:

• If {{Citation}} can already automatically choose the display format for the "accessdate" parameter that accords with the reader's preference without any need to wikilink that date, why can't this be implemented for the "date" parameter?
• Should I continue to indicate dates in citation templates in the YYYY-MM-DD format in case some fix is implemented, or should I start putting dates in the "1 August 1968"/"August 1, 1968" format without wikilinks, as I've started to do?

— Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 04:40, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

{{Citation}} cannot automatically choose the display format for the "accessdate" parameter that accords with the reader's preference. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 04:59, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

• Correct. It used to just automatically link whatever was put there. Anything other than an ISO date would be turned red, so it was a pain in the butt. Ohconfucius (talk) 09:05, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

That's odd. It seems to be working for me. When I use the parameter "accessdate=2008-10-24" in {{Citation}}, it renders as "Retrieved on 24 October 2008". Or does the template simply convert the YYYY-MM-DD date to the international (as opposed to the US) date format? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 05:20, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

• About time too. Bravo, Plasticup! I've been asking for those templates to be delinked for yonks, bearing in mind wikilinking of dates to articles has been deprecated for some time. Even if DA had not been deprecated, the linking within templates is mindless and mind-numbing. I have also been working around the issue by not usingcitation templates or by removing the access dates therefrom. While I can see some merit in linking certain dates within an article (in a restrained and not blanket manner), I see no point whatsoever in linking a reference to the page of a date or year article. I was more bothered by the actual physical link established with date articles. I personally don't care how it renders. Wikimagic is not all that relevant here, AFAICT. Ohconfucius (talk) 08:57, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Current behaviour

Trying to work out whats going we have following behaviour for IP uses

• {{Citation|last=Blogs|first=Joe|title=Example title|url=http://www.example.org/|date=2007-01-01|publication-date=2008-07-05|accessdate=2008-10-24}}

Displays as: Blogs, Joe (2007-01-01), Example title (published 2008-07-05). Retrieved on 24 October 2008

• {{Citation|last=Blogs|first=Joe|title=Example title|url=http://www.example.org/|date=January 1 2007|publication-date=July 5 2008|accessdate=October 24 2008}}

Displays as: Blogs, Joe (January 1 2007), Example title (published July 5 2008). Retrieved on 24 October 2008

• {{Citation|last=Blogs|first=Joe|title=Example title|url=http://www.example.org/|date=1 January 2007|publication-date=5 July 2008|accessdate=24 October 2008}}

Displays as: Blogs, Joe (1 January 2007), Example title (published 5 July 2008). Retrieved on 24 October 2008

logged in users will have accessdate appearing per their preferences.

So accessdate accepts any reasonable format and uses wikimagic to displays sensibly. date and publication-date have no wikimagic so will display as passed in. No date parameters are linked by the template.

I would propose using {{date}} around the display of date and publication-date so wikimagic can be applied. --Salix (talk): 10:49, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

You're wrong about one thing: Accessdate displays in DMY format no matter what the user's preferences and no matter what the format used in the rest of the article. Your preference must just be set to DMY format, try changing it temporarily and see what happens. Anomie⚔ 11:07, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikilinking to allow autoformatting is now depreciated because it is visible to only an extreme minority of readers. See MOS:UNLINKDATES. Plasticup ^T/C 12:01, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

FYI, it's deprecated not depreciated. There is a difference in meaning. — Bellhalla (talk) 14:44, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Also using {{date}} would not work for date and publication-date as these only work for dates since 1970,bug 11686 and can't handle just a year value like date=2008.

It seems to me that bots fixing accessdate is fine as there is a reasonable default, but bots converting date and publication-date parameters to ISO format is not a good idea, as this looks ugly for everyone. --Salix (talk): 11:25, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

NO. The {{tl:Date}} template might be useful for access dates, since such dates are restricted to the range 1983 (Internet turned on) to the present. The next time someone proposes the use of {{Date}} outside the range 1 January 1900 through 19 January 2038, I will nominate the damn thing for deletion on the grounds it is an Attractive nuisance. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 13:27, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I say delete it now, or at least make it a no-op. If dates aren't going to be formatted according to user preference, there's absolutely no advantage in that template changing YYYY-MM-DD to D MMM YYYY over just entering D MMM YYYY directly, and it prevents easy use of any other date format. Also, I hate to point it out because it will give more license to the nutcases pushing this sort of template, but Template:Bug looks close to removing the 1970-2038 limitation on {{#time}}. Anomie⚔ 00:34, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

I have also been removing the current linked dates in some articles (see United Kingdom, for example, through which I have only partially progressed) where the citations use the cite web templates. However, realising that the ISO form of dates is not really a good thing, I have been routinely changing "|accessdate=2008-02-02" with "|accessdaymonth=2 February|accessyear=2008", which I think makes the whole business much more palatable to others. With a bit of effort, I think it could easily be automated. I understand that the same solution is available in the citation templates. I recommend that in the absence of an automated tool to make that change, it is done manually, as I have been doing. It may mean more time, but there isn't a race over this, and we don't have to change everything overnight. I do, however, think that leaving the ISO form is a bit ugly and not really to be encouraged.  DDStretch  (talk) 15:33, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

* Ahem *

• Would someone please explain what this "wiki-magic" thing is? I'm still in the dark about it.
• In citation templates, should we be writing "date=2008-10-24" or "date=24 October 2008"? Or does it not matter?

— Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 15:54, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Currently "wiki-magic" is a figment of the imagination. accessdate are converted to 24 October 2008, all other dates are left untouched by template. There is no wiki-magic to format dates in the template to users preference, there is no wikimagic to convert the date or publication-date in 2008-10-24 format to anything sensible.

Following MOS:DATE

• Dates in article references should all have the same format.
• Either February 14, 1990 or 14 February 1990 is acceptable format, 1990-02-14 is discouraged.
• 1990-02-14 is OK for accessdate as its turned into 14 February 1990.

--Salix (talk): 19:49, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I find it interesting how people tend to ignore the sentence "However, [YMD format dates] may be useful in long lists and tables for conciseness and ease of comparison" (emphasis mine) in WP:MOSNUM when talking about date formats for reference lists. Anomie⚔ 00:34, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe that's because style manuals and reputable publications often use numerical dates in tables and lists, but seldom in citations. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 01:49, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Salix. I think that's good advice as it's in line with the current Manual of Style. That being the case, perhaps Plasticup should cease to simply remove links from the "date" parameter in citation templates, but instead replace them with a date in the international ("25 October 2008") or US format ("October 25, 2008") following the guidelines in WP:MOSNUM. As for a date specified in the "accessdate" parameter, it can remain in the YYYY-MM-DD format since it renders properly in the international format when viewed. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 05:54, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) Jack Lee please strike the word "properly" in your posting, since the international format for the accessdate is correct in some articles, but not others. Also my experiments indicate that if the accessdate is entered in the US format, an error will occur: the word "Retrieved" will appear twice. See below. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 12:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Er, OK. But doesn't the "accessdate" parameter have to take dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format? My understanding is that no other format works for it. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 15:15, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I was looking at the wrong example. If I enter the accessdate in the Month DD, YYYY format, it displays in the international format, which will be incorrect in some articles. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 15:30, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

accessdate error

The following citation:

*{{Citation| first=Mark | last=Wilson| title=Product Review: ICOM IC-7700 HF and 6 Meter Transceiver| month=October |year=2008| journal=QST| url=http://www.arrl.org| accessdate=2008-9-4}}

Renders thus:

• Wilson, Mark (2008), "Product Review: ICOM IC-7700 HF and 6 Meter Transceiver", QST, retrieved 2008-9-4 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Notice the word "Retrieved" appears twice. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 12:22, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Strange. I've looked at your example using both Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 and it renders fine on my computer – no duplication of the word Retrieved. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 15:15, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

When I use Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP I get the word "Retrieved" twice, but when I use Firefox I only get it once. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 15:28, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Could you paste in the generated html source for the reference. --82.138.219.137 (talk) 16:26, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Here's what I got using Mozilla Firefox:

<ul>
<li><cite style="font-style:normal" id="CITEREFWilson2008">Wilson, Mark (2008), "<a href="http://www.arrl.org" class="external text"
title="http://www.arrl.org" rel="nofollow">Product Review: ICOM IC-7700 HF and 6 Meter Transceiver</a>",
<i>QST</i><span class="printonly">, <<a href="http://www.arrl.org" class="external free" title="http://www.arrl.org"
rel="nofollow">http://www.arrl.org</a>></span>. Retrieved on <span class="wpAutoDate">4 September 2008</span></cite>
<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&
amp;rft.atitle=Product+Review%3A+ICOM+IC-7700+HF+and+6+Meter+Transceiver&rft.jtitle=QST&rft.aulast=Wilson&
amp;rft.aufirst=Mark&rft.au=Wilson%2C+Mark&rft.date=2008&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arrl.org&
amp;rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Template_talk:Citation"><span style="display: none;"> </span></span></li>
</ul>

— Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 16:41, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Here is the HTML source I get using Internet Explorer:

<ul>
<li><cite style="font-style:normal" id="CITEREFWilson2008">Wilson, Mark (2008), "<a href="http://www.arrl.org" class="external text" title="http://www.arrl.org" rel="nofollow">Product Review: ICOM IC-7700 HF and 6 Meter Transceiver</a>", <i>QST</i><span class="printonly">, <<a href="http://www.arrl.org" class="external free" title="http://www.arrl.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.arrl.org</a>></span>. Retrieved on <span class="wpAutoDate">4 September 2008</span></cite><span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Product+Review%3A+ICOM+IC-7700+HF+and+6+Meter+Transceiver&rft.jtitle=QST&rft.aulast=Wilson&rft.aufirst=Mark&rft.au=Wilson%2C+Mark&rft.date=2008&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arrl.org&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:Template_talk:Citation"><span style="display: none;"> </span></span></li>
</ul>

Also, I found that if I changed the width of my Internet Explorer browser window, I could make one of the two copies of "Retrieved" go away. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 16:59, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Curiouser and curiouser. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 17:19, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

There is a spurious '>' in there. See "</a>>" shortly before "Retrieved". In the posted snippet this is actually a "&gt;", but seems (I presume) to be throwing IE off. -- Fullstop (talk) 18:40, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Does the following render better

• User:Salix alba/Citation

I've used a copy of the citation template {{User:Salix alba/Citation}} edited to remove the spurious symbols.--Salix (talk): 19:02, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

No difference. See it at User:Gerry Ashton/sandbox3#As above, with rendering fix. The HTML is

<li><cite style="font-style:normal" id="CITEREFWilson2008">Wilson, Mark (2008), "<a href="http://www.arrl.org" class="external text" title="http://www.arrl.org" rel="nofollow">Product Review: ICOM IC-7700 HF and 6 Meter Transceiver</a>", <i>QST</i><span class="printonly">, <<a href="http://www.arrl.org" class="external free" title="http://www.arrl.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.arrl.org</a>></span></cite><span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Product+Review%3A+ICOM+IC-7700+HF+and+6+Meter+Transceiver&rft.jtitle=QST&rft.aulast=Wilson&rft.aufirst=Mark&rft.au=Wilson%2C+Mark&rft.date=2008&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arrl.org&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:User:Gerry_Ashton/sandbox3"><span style="display: none;"> </span></span></li>

--Gerry Ashton (talk) 20:07, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Very odd. I guess it might be a bug in IE. There is a chance is something to do with your monobook or css, do you get the same if you log out. BTW the html immediately above does not seem to match. --Salix (talk): 21:48, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I get the same result when I'm logged out. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 22:43, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

what's up?? citations with two editors??

Something seems to have happened to screw up citations with two editors. See for instance Chicano literature or Tomás Rivera. What's up? Please fix this back asap. Thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 06:01, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Reverted for now - making note at original request. SkierRMH (talk) 06:08, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks. Yes, that's done the trick. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 06:11, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Delink the dates produced by citation templates

Your typical citation looks something like this:

Author (date). "Title of the Publication". Publisher. Retrieved on date.

There is absolutely no reason to wikilink the dates. The previous justification was to allow autoformatting for dates, but that feature has now been deprecated, per MOS:UNLINKDATES. In accordance with this policy change, citation templates should no longer wikilink dates. Plasticup ^T/C 18:13, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree absolutely there is no longer any reason to link dates in citation templates. However, by simply delinking the dates, you are now making them display in the format YYYY-MM-DD which is also deprecated by WP:MOSNUM. Can you consider replacing the dates with dates in the format "27 October 2008" or "October 27, 2008"? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 18:29, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, the Citation template is not capable of correctly formatting the accessdate if an article uses the American date format. The only solution immediately available for this problem is to erase the entire citation and type it by hand, not using a template. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 19:33, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes it can (or is supposed to) see examples in #Current_behaviour above. If you have an example where it does not could you post here. --Salix (talk): 23:22, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I am talking about a different issue. I mean that the template should be modified so that it does not automatically link dates. Right now some of the citation templates link the date no matter what format is used. Consider this example from {{Cite web}}:

{{cite web|author=Example Author|date=2008-09-08|title=Fictional title|url=http://www.google.com}}

displays as:

Example Author (2008-09-08). "Fictional title". {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)

The wikilinking of that date is managed by the template, not by the input. The template explicitly adds the wikilinking to un-wikilinked input. It should not do that. Plasticup ^T/C 19:37, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Thats {{cite web}} not {{Citation}}. Citation does not auto link dates as the examples a few sections above show. --Salix (talk): 23:22, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

It appears in multiple citation templates. I thought that this would be as good a place as any to develop a consensus. Should I take it to the {{cite web}} talk page? Plasticup ^T/C 00:09, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, go ahead and request on the {{cite xxx}} series talk pages that automatic linking of dates should be discontinued. However, as has been pointed out above, there's no such problem with {{Citation}}. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 05:21, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree, all the citation templates should not link dates. I've had the issue already come up during an A-class review of an article. JonCatalán^(Talk) 04:05, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Plasticup: kudos for de-linking [xyz]date= in {{cite xxx}} and {{citation}}. I don't know what tools you are using, but if this is being done manually (and if its not too much trouble) could you perhaps also infer what date-format ought to be used and accordingly "rewrite" ISO cruft as something sensible? Thx. -- Fullstop (talk) 20:51, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I second that. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 06:38, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Punctuation

I probably should not do this per WP:BIKESHED, but the proposed changes to template make a few small punctuation changes

• Current: First, Alpha; Second, Beta & Third, Gamma (1 January 2007), Example title (published 5 July 2008). Retrieved on 24 October 2008
• Sandbox: First, Alpha; Second, Beta; Third, Gamma (1 January 2007), Example title (published 5 July 2008), Retrieved on 24 October 2008

Namely having a ; rather than an & before last author, and a , rather than a . before Retrieved.--Salix (talk): 23:46, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

And, as I've said more than once, this is a step backwards. I'm not entirely sure why this has gone live so soon and so fast. I don't see much in the way of discussion here. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 03:47, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I've got no views on the use of the ampersand, but would support the replacement of the full stop with a comma (e.g., "... (published 5 July 2008), retrieved on 24 October 2008") – note the lowercase "r" in "retrieved". I feel this would make the template easier to use in footnotes when there are multiple {{Citation}} statements. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 05:24, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Return to previous punct per jbmurray. -- Fullstop (talk) 20:42, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Can we have this returned to previous punctuation? Both moves here are moves backwards, in my view. Thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 09:18, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd also like it to be returned to what it was. Both changes seem steps backwards to me.  DDStretch  (talk) 10:01, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Forgive my frustration, but the only fast thing about this three-month long process has been the complaints from people who decided not to comment at the construction stage. This move to a common core template for Citation and Cite journal will make the tedious maintenance work much easier in the future and save editors lots of time, while providing a consistent style to the encyclopaedia. References are meant to display information in a consistent and easy to read style, and arguing about petty details such as punctuation makes no difference to that role. The new template, as it is, works - if matters such as commas and ampersands are of significant importance, I'm sure somebody will come forwards and propose a solution. If not, maybe the matter isn't worth holding up a substantial improvement over. Let's get out of the bikeshed and make this improvement. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:15, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

As I've asked before without ever receiving a reply, where was the discussion for all this? You say it's been a long process, but I see no evidence of the process itself; I see merely hasty and un-thought-out change for the sake of change. As I've said elsewhere, in the discussion of so-called "unicite," I too would prefer consistency. But there's no need to accept steps backward as part of this. Punctuation is not here a "petty detail"; you don't seem to understand how style manuals work. I've proposed a solution: please fix. Many thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 20:23, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

See the links I've just added under your request above - I think our posts overlapped. The reasons for the change are all spelled out at length there. And feel free to be bold and make the fix yourself. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:26, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Ah, so the discussion was all at "cite x," though the changes were to "citation." That hardly seems to make sense. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 20:56, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

P.S. re. Style manuals; wikipedia's WP:MOS doesn't specify what punctuation should be used in references. Feel free to fight that battle elsewhere; that's not discussion for a template page, as a template acts to ensure conformity to a single style. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:28, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

No, but the template imposes a certain punctuation style. By bringing citation into line with "cite x," without any consultation, you've changed that style, and for the worse, as has been mentioned repeatedly here. As I've also said before, I am not sufficiently up on template syntax to fix it myself. It seems to easy to break things, as happened with the change here. I'm merely asking you to fix this back. Many thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 20:56, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) There are plenty of mentions on this page to the sandboxed code that was used. That being said, it is reasonable to raise objections now although you missed the examples previously. I think that discarding the ampersand is an improvement--the template works much better with the various possible author parameters & the punctuation is self-consistent. I agree that we should keep a full stop instead of a comma preceding "Retrieved on..." --Karnesky (talk) 21:39, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

OK, now I think I've finally understood this. The ampersand is being removed because "cite x" uses (or its users tend to employ) author= and coauthor= fields. The latter adds "and" to the output. There's the fear that when combined with last= and first= fields, the output could produce "& and." Is this the issue, then?

The solution to this is simple: to deprecate the use of "author=" and "coauthors=", both of which are far inferior to the use of last= and first=. Again, please change this back. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 11:44, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

No. As I had responded to you earlier, both templates permit the 'author=' parameter. There are examples of this parameter being used by both templates & the limited number of separate authors that has been allowed historically in {{citation}} means that every paper with more than four authors has problematic metadata. --Karnesky (talk) 00:46, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes the using a ampersand rather than a semi-colon for the last author than does make the template considerable more complicated, adding an extra nine branches, plus a few more for multiple editors.

But this is how things were before with {{citation}}. Please change this back. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 11:44, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

The current sandbox version does have a . before Retrieved. So no problem there. , ", Retrieved" is clearly wrong. Jacks suggestion of ", retrieved" may be good making the citation a single sentence. But again adds complexity, requiring an extra parameter as the cite x family have full stops separating all fields.

Another issues is the terminating full stop. Cite x has one Citation does not.

One other simplification I've been thinking of is concerns linking of PMC links. Currently if the citation has a PMC link but no url then the article title is linked to the PMC. If the citation has a url and a PMC then the article title is linked url and the PMC link does not appears (broken). In the sandbox version the PMC link is

• PMC no URL Viollet B; Andreelli F; Jørgensen SB; et al. (2003), "Introduction: An American Literary Tradition", The AMP-activated protein kinase alpha2 catalytic subunit controls whole-body insulin sensitivity, vol. 111, pp. 91–8, doi:10.1172/JCI16567, PMC 151837, PMID 12511592 {{citation}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• current PMC with URL Viollet B; Andreelli F; Jørgensen SB; et al. (2003), "Introduction: An American Literary Tradition", The AMP-activated protein kinase alpha2 catalytic subunit controls whole-body insulin sensitivity, vol. 111, pp. 91–8, doi:10.1172/JCI16567, PMC 151837, PMID 12511592 {{citation}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• sandbox PMC with URL Viollet B; Andreelli F; Jørgensen SB; et al. (2003), "Introduction: An American Literary Tradition", The AMP-activated protein kinase alpha2 catalytic subunit controls whole-body insulin sensitivity, vol. 111, pp. 91–8, doi:10.1172/JCI16567, PMC 151837, PMID 12511592 {{citation}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

I'm not convinced that the PMC link deserves a special place being linked via the title, doi's pmid's, isbns . It would make things a lot simpler just to always link the PMC after. --Salix (talk): 23:04, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Because I'm in favour of allowing citation templates to be more flexibly used, I support: (1) keeping the whole citation in one sentence (and thus using ", retrieved" instead of ". Retrieved"), as this means a series of citation templates can be placed in one footnote separated by semicolons; and (2) not ending citation templates with a full stop, for the aforementioned reason and also to allow for additional elements to be added to the end of the citation (e.g., "(in Latin)", ", Plate 145"). — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 12:02, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

I see no consensus on either the ampersand issue or the punctuation and capitalization used in the retrieval date (other than that a comma followed by an uppercase letter is not desired). While it is great that Martin and others are trying to make the core as flexible as possible, I think we should also discuss default behavior. --Karnesky (talk) 14:41, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean "default behaviour" in the sense of a unified form that would be acceptable to both? -- Fullstop (talk) 18:29, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Presently, I am confining "behavior" to refer to how {{Citation}}, alone, should format:

1. presence of an ampersand
2. punctuation and capitalization of retrieval dates.

If I may try to summarize these points.

1. The argument for keeping an ampersand is that the template has recently used this punctuation (given by jbmurray, FullStop, and DDstretch). The arguments against jettisoning the ampersand is simplification, consistency with other templates, and consistency of author separators within this one template. I give this argument & Martin may agree to it. Salix commented on the change, but I see no opinions.

2. The arguments for keeping the period followed by an uppercase letter are that it is how this template recently worked and is how other citation templates currently work (given by jbmurray, FullStop, DDStretch, Karnesky). The arguments for changing it to a comma followed by a lowercase letter are that it is consistent with the rest of the punctuation presently used by {{citation}} and that it allows {{citation}} to be used in a sentence (given by JackLee). I don't know where Martin and Salix stand on this.

--Karnesky (talk) 19:11, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

My opinion is that neither punctuation format makes it harder to find or maintain the citation, therefore either is fine with me. I think it's important to stress that the sandbox template now uses the punctuation format that the templates did historically, and that the default punctuation can be easily changed in the future for either template in the code of the template itself, or on a case-by-case basis by adding a parameter to the {citation|} code.

I'm worried that this punctuation debate is likely to cause confusion about the status of the Sandbox template, which is independent of this debate. At some point in the future, somebody needs to have a debate at a manual of style page about the preferred punctuation method in citations. The templates can then be modified to comply with any consensus gained there. But the talk pages of templates are not really the places for stylistic discussions. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 02:37, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Change Cite/core (was "related change at Template:Cite journal")

Just checking: There is a request for a change to a protected page at Template talk:Cite journal#Problems. However, on digging deeper, it appears that before that change can be accomplished, that Citation/core must be changed first. But, I'm not seeing a request for a change on that one. So, before I proceed, does anyone object to this change? --Elonka 00:32, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

proposed diff --Karnesky (talk) 00:49, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

In fact, the edit required is this one - a couple of minor issues were raised since the edit was proposed which have now been addressed. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 13:20, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

{{editrequest}}

The proposed edit reverts to the old punctuation behavior. Are there any issues that should keep us from applying it? --Karnesky (talk) 23:00, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

All reported technical issues have been resolved. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 02:41, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

I see an edit request here, but it's not clear what edit is being requested? Please be specific? Thanks, --Elonka 01:22, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

At minimum, merge the current version of {{citation/core/sandbox}} into {{citation/core}}. This does not break anything on {{citation}} or {{cite journal}} & fixes some things.

A merge of {{citation/sandbox}} to {{citation}} would address additional gripes (that I would not consider to be "broken"), above. --Karnesky (talk) 01:35, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

I updated {{citation/core}} from the sandbox, per request. However, {{citation/sandbox}} appears to have a link to the other sandbox page, and since I'm not that familiar with the code, I don't want to be guessing what should or shouldn't be kept. Go ahead and update it though now that the first one's done, and then re-enable the request, thanks. --Elonka 01:54, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd rather keep the sandbox linking to the "citation/core/sandbox" so that further testing can be done if necessary; the only thing you need to change when copying it to citation/core is to replace the line

|{{Citation/core/sandbox

with

|{{Citation/core

Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 04:23, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

It would be great if Template:Citation/core/sandbox could be copied into Template:Citation/core. A minor but important change to the COinS metadata has been implemented in response to the integration of Template:Cite book. Any effect to the output of template:citation or template:Cite journal, which also use this core template, will be an improvement to the metadata. Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:54, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

This does bring up a question. I added a diff so that the CoiNS .aulast parameter was only present if a first name is also given, i.e. if both last and first parameters are suplied to the template. Its since been reverted so that .aulast is always included i.e. when we have last, or author template parameter. Not sure if the change was intentional. Anyway does anyone has a view in this behaviour? --Salix (talk): 23:30, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed the revert (which appears to be unintentional); I had proposed the edit to allow your change to be implemented. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:37, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

What happened to DOIs?

Anyone know why DOIs in {{Citation}} are not displayed any more and no longer link article titles to external websites? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 20:07, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

This is fixed in {{citation/sandbox}}:

Müller, Erwin W.; Panitz, J. A.; McLane, S. Brooks (1968), "The Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope", Review of Scientific Instruments, 39 (1): 83–86, doi:10.1063/1.1683116, ISSN 0034-6748 {{citation}}: |first3= missing |last3= (help)CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)

--Karnesky (talk) 22:00, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. Hope it's going live soon. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 03:11, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Should be fixed in live version now. For compatibility with naming conventions in /core I've capitalised the internal parameter. --Salix (talk): 12:16, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Yup. Up and running. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 17:04, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Restoring support for "quotes=no" to {{Cite journal}}

As per Template talk:Cite journal #Replacement for quotes=no for reprints, errata, etc.? there is occasionally a need when citing journal sources to not put quotes around the item names. This occurs for names like "Erratum" and "Reprint" which are not titles, but rather simply name the source in question. Until {{Cite journal}} switched over to use {{Citation/core}}, this was supported with the "quotes=no" parameter. For example, this:

• {{cite journal |author= [[Leo Kanner|Kanner L]] |title= Autistic disturbances of affective contact |journal= Nerv Child |volume=2 |pages=217–50 |year=1943}} {{cite journal |title=Reprint |quotes=no |year=1968 |journal= Acta Paedopsychiatr |volume=35 |issue=4 |pages=100–36 |pmid=4880460}}

would format as this:

• Kanner L (1943). "Autistic disturbances of affective contact". Nerv Child. 2: 217–50. Reprint. Acta Paedopsychiatr 35 (4): 100–36. 1968. PMID 4880460.

Now, unfortunately, it formats this way, with unwanted quotation marks around "Reprint":

• Kanner L (1943). "Autistic disturbances of affective contact". Nerv Child. 2: 217–50. "Reprint". Acta Paedopsychiatr. 35 (4): 100–36. 1968. PMID 4880460.

Of course this can be worked around by formatting the citation by hand, but that has other problems: for example, when the template changes to use a different style (e.g., volume numbers not being boldfaced), then we have to alter the by-hand citations.

Let's fix the problem by restoring support for "quotes=no" to {{Cite journal}}. This can be done by changing the obvious two instances of '"' to '{{#ifeq:{{{Quotes|}}}|no||"}}' in Template:Citation/core (see this diff) and by adding '|Quotes={{{quotes|}}}' to Template:Cite journal (see this diff). This will fix the formatting of Autism and of other articles that rely on quotes=no. It is an upward-compatible change.

I'll also mention this on Template talk:Cite journal as the proposal affects that template too.

Eubulides (talk) 23:59, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

But the title of that work is not "reprint." You are subverting the title field. The full stop is also not desirable. Why not use something like:

• {{cite journal |author= [[Leo Kanner|Kanner L]] |title= Autistic disturbances of affective contact |journal= Nerv Child |volume=2 |pages=217–50 |year=1943}} Reprinted in {{cite journal |year=1968 |journal= Acta Paedopsychiatr |volume=35 |issue=4 |pages=100–36 |pmid=4880460}}
• Kanner L (1943). "Autistic disturbances of affective contact". Nerv Child. 2: 217–50. Reprinted in Acta Paedopsychiatr. 35 (4): 100–36. 1968. PMID 4880460. {{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

--Karnesky (talk) 00:44, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion; I did that. However, one problem remains: the reprint year (1968) gets formatted horribly, after the page numbers, in such a way that the reader might reasonably think we're talking about page 1968. Is there a good way to fix that? Eubulides (talk) 10:14, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Be a good chil'

(OT) ... and be a good chil' and use last=Kanner|first=Leo|authorlink=Leo Kanner, and don't abbreviate journal titles. -- Fullstop (talk) 01:13, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Someone needs to initiate dialogue with FA reviewers about an aspect of this. I was advised by a reviewer recently that in footnotes authors' names should be reflected in their normal order, which would necessitate the use of "author=[[Leo Kanner]]", and only surname first in appendices ("References", "Further reading", etc.). — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 04:07, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

News to me. Can you provide the link? --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 05:11, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

See "Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Emery Molyneux", just above the "Issues resolved, Ealdgyth" section. Septentrionalis (Pmanderson) said: "We should consider whether last name first (especially in notes) serves any purpose. The normal order would simplify linking and be clearer", and qp10qp said "I suggest using first name second name for notes and second name first name for booklists/bibliographies. Most manuals of style (I don't know about ours) recommend this, and it makes sense, because the only point of second name first name is for easy location in an alphabetical list". — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 07:21, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

OK. But this isn't suggesting any necessary problem with articles that don't following this convention. It's not that they will be failed at FAC.

And by the way, I agree with this suggestion. I think it would be a very good idea to have two versions of this template, say citationnote and citationbiblio, in which the format varied along the lines qp suggests.

Personally, I avoid this problem by using {{harvnb}} (which is of course an example of a template that comes in different styles: with or without brackets). --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 07:58, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, on re-reading the FA review I agree it's true that following what the reviewers recommended is not compulsory for an article to achieve FA status. Instead of having two separate templates {{citationnote}} and {{citationbiblio}}, perhaps a parameter called "biblio" could be introduced. If "biblio=on", then the last name will display in front. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 09:11, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

That (a "biblio=" field or similar; should probably be a "notes=" field) would work for me. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 09:51, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

What's next? Will the editors working regularly on this template go ahead and make the change? Or do we wait for more editors to comment on this proposal? — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 15:20, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Let's give the proposal more than 6 hours and 1 comment to gestate before implementing it. RossPatterson (talk) 17:11, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

That was a rather fleeting mention in the FAC discussion. I am opposed to this--it adds needless complexity & there is no reason to have different name orderings in different citations. In corner cases where a particular article has a real need for a different way of styling the authors, editors may use the 'authors=' or 'author=' parameters. Because the need for this feature is so small, I'd rather lose a little bit of semantics than end up confusing people with extra parameters and documentation. --Karnesky (talk) 18:40, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but in something like Autism I far prefer the standard medical style. Not only is that article, well, medical; but the medical style makes for shorter citations that are easier to read if you know the subject (admittedly the journal abbreviations are gibberish if you don't know the subject, but they'll typically be gibberish anyway even if you don't abbreviate them). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eubulides (talk • contribs) 10:14, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

(outdent)

• "[journal titles will] typically be gibberish anyway even if you don't abbreviate them" is not an excuse to abbreviate.
• At FAC, Septentrionalis (Pmanderson) apparently forgot about {{harvnb}} when he stated We should consider whether last name first (especially in notes) serves any purpose.
• The biblio=/notes= field is really not a good idea: as Karnesky said, it adds needless complexity, and author= already gives people enough leeway to shoot themselves in the foot. Moreover, it introducing an inconsistency problem again; enforcing uniformity will be as much a nightmare as enforcing uniformity between {{citation}}/{{cite xxx}} is now. So no biblio=/notes= please. -- Fullstop (talk) 19:19, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

• Well, if it's massively complex, then no problem. But it is an anomalous mode of referencing for anybody used to the Humanities or Social Sciences. I don't know of a style that would put author last in footnotes. It's a pity a fix couldn't be implemented. But this is far from the most important priority. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 21:44, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Multiple instances of reference

Over at Template talk:cite journal, Karnesky's suggestion was also noted by jbmurray in response to Eublides' question, and LeadSongDog quite correctly pointed out that having two instances of the reference leads to a question as to which is being cited. I agree with both points, especially the latter - Wikipedia:Citing sources#Cite the place where you found the material clearly says "It is improper to obtain a citation from an intermediate source without making clear that you saw only that intermediate source. For example, you might find some information on a Web page that is attributed to a certain book. Unless you look at the book yourself to check that the information is there, your source is really the Web page, which is what you must cite. The credibility of your article rests on the credibility of the Web page, as well as the book, and your article must make that clear." RossPatterson (talk) 17:29, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

As mentioned there, I disagree. One should cite the source that one used, but it's a convenience to the reader to also cite other ways to read the same source. Here's one example:

Posey DJ, Stigler KA, Erickson CA, McDougle CJ (2008). "Antipsychotics in the treatment of autism". J Clin Invest. 118 (1): 6–14. doi:10.1172/JCI32483. PMC 2171144. PMID 18172517.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

This gives four different ways to get copies of the article. That's OK. It's a convenience to the reader, for example, to give a URL both to the canonical copy at the publisher and the non-canonical copy at PubMed Central, as well as to another copy of the abstract at PubMed and a way to access one more more copies via doi. Eubulides (talk) 10:14, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, maybe this is field-specific. But in my field (literature), we care even about small differences. Even if (say) just the punctuation is changed, then it strictly isn't the same source. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 21:39, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Doc for /core?

As we seem to be headed down a path where {{Citation/core}} will be used by lots of citation templates as their guts, it would seem to be time to document it independent of {{Citation}}. There are a number of parameters for which the intentions aren't intuitively obvious (e.g., Ref=, At=) or which appear to be duplicative (e.g., Place= and PublicationPlace=), or for which there are non-obvious interactions (e.g., URL= and IncludedWorkURL=). I can take a crack at some of it, having just had my arms elbow deep in the beast's entrails, but I would appreciate help from others who have been doing the same lately. Unless, of course, y'all think this isn't a good idea after all. RossPatterson (talk) 23:21, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't think this'll be necessary; the code itself will be more informative to anyone making edits to the template, and 'everyday' users will not need to use these parameters. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:23, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Parameter "Citation class="?

The recent changes for supporting {{cite journal}} introduced a new Citation class= parameter to {{Citation/core}}, defaulting to "Journal". It's not obvious what it does, but the default value is surprising: there isn't an explicit specification in {{Citation}}, so it's getting this CSS class too. There doesn't appear to be a "Journal" style selector in the default WP MonoBook skin, can someone explain what purpose this parameter serves? And should it default to ""?

The parameter also seems ill-named - CitationClass= would have been more in keeping with the existing parameters. It's not too late for a change of name - as best I can tell, it's only used in the yet-to-be-installled {{cite book/sandbox}}. {{{cite journal}} tries to use it, but the parameter is mistyped there as Citation type=Journal. RossPatterson (talk) 00:38, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Ewwww! First, citations are content, and should not have inherent styles. Secondly, bibliography should not change formatting from one citation to the next. Third, content should not be (and should not be given the chance of) overriding bibliography section style. -- Fullstop (talk) 03:09, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

The class is solely for the purpose of passing data to the COinS metadata tag and does not affect appearance. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:19, 17 November 2008 (UTC)