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RfC: Should Template:cite doi cease creating a separate subpage for each DOI?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Following this discussion, Template:cite doi currently operates by searching the doi string against an individual template subpage within Category:Cite doi templates (each of which is simply a hardcoded {{cite journal}} citation). There are currently over 50k doi template subpages (more than 10% out of all templatespace) out of approximately 67 million doi in existence. Each citation is of very low (or no) usage. Should every subtemplate under Template:cite doi be substituted into each page as a cite journal citation? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 05:00, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support

  1. Support The current system goes against WP:T3, namely each template is a hard-coded instance of a cite journal reference. Along with the massive effort required to keep watch of all these templates from vandalism, the additional complexity for new users creates does not make up for the minor savings created because people don't have to copy and paste a fairly small string. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 05:00, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support One of the very oldest guidelines for the Template namespace has been "Templates should not be used to store article content." Citations support article content, and are themselves article content. Splitting any substantive article text out of the main namespace makes it harder for the content to be reused elsewhere (transwiki'd, translated, etc.). Page watching is a major concern as well, as someone could change the cite doi child template, but that edit would go unnoticed and disconnected from the article itself. The other major reason for the policy is that templates are inherently hard for new users to understand. --Netoholic @ 06:14, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support unless they can be adapted to overcome the problems of the system as it stands at present. One of the main problems that I see with the existing system is that it is a fixed output and does not cater for the differing styles of output required for consistency in articles. For example the author fields need to allow for first/last or last/first format, date fields need to be output in day first, month first or ISO format. At the moment if the output style does not match that of the article the template has to be substed and modified to match. Keith D (talk) 11:18, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Support difficulty monitoring, problems with cite var, difficulty in verifying etc. I like the idea in theory but in application it just doesn't seem to work so well, SUBST would allow continued use of function but resolve some issues. - - MrBill3 (talk) 20:52, 13 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Support. Not only I agree with the OP, my incentive for support is also some of the things that the opposing people have said. For example, User:RomanSpa says that some of the articles implementing the templates receive very little traffic. However, I do know for a fact that articles always receive more traffic than templates, as the templates have virtually no standalone readership. In addition, when a piece of info is brought out of an article an into a template, the weak link becomes two: The calling code in the article and the template itself; both need monitoring and maintenance. And since most of these are transcluded only once, the burden of monitoring soars. Also User:Headbomb says "newbies would not use the system in the first place" which is actually promoting elitism and is actually a big flaw. Coupling this with RomanSpa's comment means that these templates' benefit of readership through transclusion is curtailed.
    Best regards,
    Codename Lisa (talk) 03:55, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Comment. I think you may have slightly misunderstood me. When I remarked that the template pages receive little traffic, I meant what we might call "direct traffic" - that is, people accessing those pages specifically to look at the content of the templates. I didn't mean that they don't receive negligible "indirect traffic", by which I mean views arising from their information's transclusion in other pages. Every time an article that includes information from a template is read, that obviously creates "indirect traffic" for the template page.
    I'm sorry to say that I feel your remark about "elitism" is way off base: I think you're confusing elitism with experience. To take myself as an example, I didn't know about citation templates at all before being invited to participate in this discussion. Now I do, and with the appropriate learning curve will now be able to incorporate them into any articles I write. I don't think you guys who already knew about them are "elite", and I certainly don't consider myself "elite" just because I now know about this kind of template - I just think I've learnt a bit, and gained a little more experience. This is just how life goes. RomanSpa (talk) 04:46, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Let me just interject here that the statement 'Every time an article that includes information from a template is read, that obviously creates "indirect traffic" for the template page" ' isn't right. Because of caching, if article A refereneces template T, template T gets a hit only as often as A is edited (not every time someone just looks at A), and maybe (for technical reasons) a bit more than that. EEng (talk) 18:35, 26 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Hi. Reading your clarification, I am becoming more and more certain that I didn't misunderstand at all. No matter how you look at it, putting the citations in the article exposes them to more scrutiny. As for your note on elitism vs. experience, let me put it frankly: You are sugarcoating elitism. Verifiability is one of the founding policies of Wikipedia. Every single person on this planet must be able to do it. This layer of obfuscation is only deterrent without benefit. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 14:38, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Hi. I don't think I understand what you mean by "sugarcoating elitism": so far as I can work out, nobody in this discussion is advocating anything elitist, and all that I meant to say is that, as with everything else, you get better at Wikipedia with experience, and as you learn how to use more of the tools at our disposal. RomanSpa (talk) 17:41, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    The only tool that should be necessary for the novice editor to update encyclopedic text (which includes citations) should be the edit window. -- Netoholic @ 20:10, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Strong support. While I think vandalism occuring on these templates is highly unlikely, the possibility is still there. Furthermore, it's inconvenient to have to go and edit another page just to fix a journal citation. Per Keith D, there is no provision in the existing system for slight variation in citation styles between articles. Substituting the templates would be the best solution to these problems. APerson (talk!) 22:19, 30 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

  1. Oppose. This should be a snow close. This system is widely used and supported. It saves space in article source and allows for the reuse of journal citations. Substitution would mean that the citations would be less likely to be consistent from one article to the next. The onus is on the OP to show that "massive effort" is required to keep these templates from vandalism. The OP posted similar questions at this discussion and received thoughtful explanations. To not link to that discussion here strikes me as surprising. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:32, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose. Proposal is unclear: is the doi subtemplate to be deleted after subst:'s?, must the bot be shut down?.
    Proposer invokes argument WP:T3. But that is a criterium for speedy deletion, explicitly about deleting duplicate templates. One thing this bot does good: there are no duplicates to begin with (and no minor variants either). So WP:T3 is out.
    Indeed I am impressed by the numbers, but for the opposite outcome. If 50,037 doi templates exist, the bot must be adding something good to this wiki. Whatever that is, we'd not want to miss it. Leaving it to the editor who, by good intention, wants to add a doi citation to a page, this number would not be reached and the quality of the citations will be lower and more inconsistent. As for the unused doi subtemplates: a bit of research with the botoperator (like: where do they come from?), and then a mass speedy might be applicable.
    Netoholic points to one of the very oldest guidelines "Templates should not be used to store article content". Must say, this is the toughest nut to crack. In short: I claim to ignore this rule (guideline). Being a 'very old' guideline is not making it better. This even apart from the fact that "article content" has meanings with grey areas (cf., navbox vs see also section). The rule ignores two basics of the web: 1. Don't copy, reuse existing code/pages and 2. Transclusion is a core principle for webpages (and for wiki no less). It is way too primitive to define content by "what is on this physical webpage". That is where HTML classes are for. Using a template to store "article content" is, at least in this situation, a very, very convenient way to do additions, improvements, and maintenance. Then Netoholic also mentions: 'makes it harder for the content to be reused elsewhere' - maybe, maybe not. 'The other major reason for the policy [sic] is that templates are inherently hard for new users to understand'. Agree on the difficulty, though not sure about whether it is actually a reason. To reduce edit complexity, is there any other way, easier, to add template functionality to an article? And that for a (doi) citation? At least the bot helps the editor. This 'cleanup' idea is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
    I have not read from an editor who actually works with these doi citations and this bot and says: "yeah, sure, bad thing". If one cannot convince working editors of the badness of this and its background, shouldn't that tell something? -DePiep (talk) 09:15, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Oppose / Snow close This is a place where WP:CSD#T3 does not apply / and where WP:IAR applies. The cite doi system is designed this way on purpose to facilitate the maintenance of citations and cleanup the edit window. I do not use this system myself, but many do and I can't think of a good reason to remove this way of doing things. The argument that "this is confusing to newbies" makes no sense, as newbies would not use the system in the first place. While the risk of template vandalism exists on paper, in practice the cite doi templates are very very rarely vandalize because the average vandal focuses on random articles / high visibility articles, and those seeking to disrupt Wikipedia will pick on higher visibility templates. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:48, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    Its not vandalism that is the only concern. Any change to a shared citation (formatting, updated edition, etc.) could negatively impact or invalidate any article text that is sharing that cite_doi. Now, its actually very rare that templates are on more than one page, but that points toward the other bad aspect of this system. --Netoholic @ 20:40, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    I read no reason for a snow close. -DePiep (talk) 00:23, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Oppose. Proposal is unclear, but I'd oppose the shutting down of the bot using Template:Cite doi, which makes valuable edits "that would be extremely tedious to do manually". The bot also makes the citations consistent when they are re-used over multiple articles, which is common. I've never come across vandalism of an article via the template cite doi or Template:Cite pmid so can't see this adds any weight to the argument.
  5. Oppose. I would like to keep this as an option until we have a better central citation database (as planned by https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Reform_of_citation_structure_for_all_Wikimedia_projects and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite). I see the cite doi template system as an acceptable temporary solution and as half a step to this (optional) final solution. So, i agree its not perfect but as a consequence I would like to substitute it for a better centralized system rather than deleting it.
    Such a central citation database on wikidata (for optional use) seems to solve most of the concerns mentioned here so far, right? Wikidata was planned for this kind of data (so guidelines support it), it was planned having transwiki usage in mind (other languages), datasets are put on the editors watchlist against vandalism, having different choices how to display the data could be implemented.
    To me it looks like the data could be much easier read/transferred from the uniformly structured cite doi subtemplates than it could be extracted from individual citations in articles (different formats /slightly inhomogeneous content). And I think authors who had chosen this central type of citation management agree with the migration to wikidata in future.--Saimondo (talk) 17:09, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Tentative Oppose. I am absolutely not an expert in this area, having been brought here by an RfC invitation. However, I have read the discussion, and have done my best to learn how to use the template (though I understand that there are problems with the bot as at the time of writing). If I understand the discussion correctly, the idea is to move individual cite journal citations into the articles in which these citations are made, rather than maintaining a large number of templates, most of which receive negligible traffic. My strong intuition is that such a move would be unwise, because the present approach allows better control of the relevant data, since it is held in a single obvious place (the particular subtemplate), and articles using this data simply incorporate it by transclusion. This seems better for consistency purposes than having several copies of the relevant data in different articles. I do agree with some of the comments made above - I can imagine a better "central database" than a large number of separate subtemplate pages - but the system as it currently stands appears to work, and doesn't appear to be reaching any obvious capacity constraints, so changes should be made very cautiously.
    I do understand the concerns of the proposers of this idea, I think, and I'd like to address one concern. It has been noted that it is general practice that "templates should not be used to store article content", and this seems like a very sensible general rule. However, it seems to me that in this case this is not what is happening. Rather, the article contains a reference, and what is held in each subtemplate is more a sort of descriptive information. Each article could just give the doi, and leave it to the reader to disentangle what that doi means; the subtemplates, as I understand it, simply provide a sort of sprinkle of sugar to make it easier for the reader to swallow.
    If I've made any errors in my understanding, please let me know. I shall, in any case, add this discussion to my watchlist and review it again in a few days. Thank you for inviting me to contribute, and I hope I haven't sounded too stupid. RomanSpa (talk) 07:22, 11 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    A very thoughtful contribution that gives a comprehensive description of the topic. Worth reading, and a pleasure to read. (If I show jealousy here, that's OK with me ;-) ). -DePiep (talk) 21:16, 11 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Tentative oppose in plagiarism of Romanspa I am barely acquainted with the topic, but I go with Romanspa's argument. If someone will come up with a better-designed and well-accepted tool, fine. Until then however, it generally is an unhealthy practice to lump together multiple functions with different internal logical structures into a single metafunction. As a rule a better approach if a need for such a combined tool became recognised would be to write a hierarchically higher level of tool that invokes lower levels without distorting their specific intentions. Established functional practice I'd say. (Still tentatively!) JonRichfield (talk) 13:10, 29 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Oppose There are lots of implications about making changes to Wikipedia and Wikimedia citation systems. Lots of reforms are necessary but this should not be the first one. See meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Reform of citation structure for all Wikimedia projects for more information. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:21, 30 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Keep - Don't worry about performance. All the DOIs will likely be moved to Wikidata at some point, substituting would be a step backwards. In the meantime, let's just keep them as is. jonkerz ♠talk 12:37, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - this is a sensible use to transclude reference material not article content. Some dois are used in many places so this reduces maintenance. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:59, 29 August 2014 (UTC).
  • Oppose mass subst'ing of all templates, because:
    • At present the bot can watch a category to identify and complete new (empty) Cite Doi templates within a minute. It's not clear how this functionality could be upheld under the proposed scheme.
    • I personally find it easier to edit references in this way (using a single edit link rather than trawling page code), and would never think to search Wikipedia to find all occurrences of a template that needed updating.
    • And at a more pragmatic level, I would feel discouraged by having a feature that I find useful deactivated without good cause; would I be the only editor to feel alienated from WP by this decision?
  • But of course, there will be individual cases (for example where custom citation styles are used) where Cite doi templates should be substed. The current system of substing these on an individual case-by-case basis seems sufficient. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 09:35, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Threaded discussion

  • Comment The OP has notified a few editors on their talk pages. This may be perceived as canvassing unless the OP is careful to notify all editors involved in previous discussions, including this one. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:32, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I forgot that discussion. I only went off the previous TfD discussion. I'll notify everyone left. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 06:13, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Request To get some perspective, I suggest that everyone thinking about this RfC look at the reality of how this system is being used. Pick a couple dozen random Category:Cite doi templates from random category pages, and check the "What links here". A shocking number of them are completely abandoned, and most have only a single use. Any thoughts that we gain any significant level of consistency among articles is going blown away by how very rare that happens. -- Netoholic @ 11:05, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Unused doi subtemplates? Start a blanket TfD for them, get arguments from the bot operator, and when agreed a bot can delete those. Now please stop panicking for an unused template. In now way that says the system is broken. -DePiep (talk) 23:50, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure that makes sense really. In the last discussion, the orphaned template was unorphaned by this edit, reinstating the template. Are the templates that are orphaned orphaned because they were substituted or orphaned because the citation has been completely removed? I'd assume the supporters of the current system would want the templates used as much as possible, so we'd need to check every 'orphaned' template to see if the template has been abandoned or the citation. I'm not making a strawman argument but it would seem strange to keep the template in its current form but not to actively search for all DOIs to be templated: either the system improves citing or it doesn't. Keeping it for the current uses only or for whoever feels like using it seems like a haphazard idea. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 04:00, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
As I said, it takes some thought and I already advised twice to seek advice from the bot operator. And yes, you do make a strawman. You are creating by your own reasoning that supporters of this template actually want to have them all, and so unused ones. Nonsense. Stop panicking for an unused template. -DePiep (talk) 08:00, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
yeah but they didn't do anything so screw that. """Oppose"""" any changes and close and warn the crooked supporters for wasting people's time here. Biased violators have no business ruining the encyclopedia for their laziness. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.137.210.28 (talk) 23:14, 9 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
In fact the project did do something (see BRFA). In the top 1500 most accessed pages within the WP:MED project, {{cite pmid}}, {{cite isbn}}, and {{cite doi}} templates have now all been substituted. Boghog (talk) 02:50, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Beside the advantages of a central citation database mentioned here and here I understand why the MED people dislike cite doi. In the source code itself you see only the doi number and cannot see directly if it is really the right publication. You only see the citation data (title, name.. of the publication) when you have the tooltips option enabled in your preferences (is it by default?) when you hoover over the citation number in the preview mode (screenshot ). I wonder whether the MED guys were aware of that, I think its not that uncomfortable. Personally, I appreciate the cleaner looks of non-inline references, especially in case of several citations in one sentence. Example Although the source code coloring by the syntax highlighter helps, a higher number of detailed in line references can still be confusing (and impairs source code readability permanently / in the long term for the sake of one time checking the ref values within the source). So I would like to leave it to the author to choose. Maybe we can brainstorm about technical improvements in the citation database projects.--Saimondo (talk) 17:37, 10 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I don't know enough about the technical aspects involved to give a firm opinion at this moment. However, I have avoided using these templates for a while now, for 2 reasons. 1/ I don't think anybody has these templates on their watchlists. Any vandalism could go undetected for a very long time. 2/ If the name of a journal is linked to the WP article on that journal, the layout will be incorrect (name in bold) if the template is used in the article on the journal itself. As for the comments above about the bot, citationbot is indeed a great help (although recently it often seems to have problems completing). However, the bot works just as well with the {{cite journal}} template as with the cite doi template. When entering a reference, I use the cite journal template with "doi=xxxxxxxxxx" as only parameter and then, after I save, run the citationbot, which normally then fills in the rest of the template. --Randykitty (talk) 10:38, 11 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Maybe a year ago someone pointed me to the doi machinery, and at first I was delighted -- all that work saved! But after a month or two I gave up and subst'ed all the templates into the article and never came back. Why? Because the bot insists on doing things its own way, overwriting data I corrected with its own incomplete or incorrect data, blocking fixes to formatting problems (such as when an article title itself contains quote marks or an apostrophe) etc. I spent a lot of time on the bot talk page trying to get those active there to understand that there need to be ways for editors to take what the bot provides and formally & permanently alter it, but what I got was a lot of insistence that I shouldn't want to do what I wanted to do -- that I should just submit myself to The Will of The Borg and be happy. It just wasn't worth it.

    On top of that are problems such as those mentioned by others here, like the need to keep all these templates on my watchlist. EEng (talk) 18:43, 26 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • I understand. This layer obfuscation eliminates the much-needed flexibility. When I had taken my article to WP:FAC, reviewers insisted the referencing style must be consistent. They didn't care about syntactic and technical issues; they wanted a consistent citation style and in all fairness, they were right.

    Best regards,
    Codename Lisa (talk) 11:05, 27 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • I agree, it might be nicer if the bot would only overwrites /"updates" the fields that had been written by a bot (not by a editor), otherwise careful manual changes might get lost. I think all cite doi templates changes can be seen on [[1]] which I imported into my feed reader. The good thing is: so far no obvious vandalism occurred since end of June.--Saimondo (talk) 14:44, 3 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question How would this change affect the "cite journal" template that comes with Wikipedia:RefToolbar? That has a search button for the doi. And how about the method using the {{cite journal}} as described by @Randykitty above? Are these both searching the same collection of templates? RockMagnetist (talk) 02:20, 2 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I think this is written directly in the article and doesn´t depend on the cite doi subtemplates. So it should´t affect this.--Saimondo (talk) 14:55, 3 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This is excellent. Finally substituting the refs into the article and getting rid of CITE PMID and CITE DOI. This will make my job of editing and updating references MUCH easier. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 17:22, 5 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The lunatics have taken over the asylum
The antediluvians have taken over the ark
The antideluvians have taken over the ark
Normally, progress is to develop a tool so that it does what you want, not take the retrograde step of abandoning it. John of Cromer (talk) mytime= Mon 14:57, wikitime= 06:57, 6 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sigh: "[the] long-standing principle and consensus that templates should not contain article content. While use of templates could reduce redundancy in articles, and improve consistency, the risk is that our articles become harder to edit and maintain if their content is in substituted templates". Please, next time, one can impose this outcome before any discussion takes place. One can argue Mk's of posts, in the end any closer will always falls back on a 2006 quote, without mentioning any counter-argument.

Following that, the closer also repeats the "used only once" argument without taking note advantages still present (and mentioned). This too could be in top of an RfC: "Please discuss, but these our habits will be enforced anyhow. After that, we might read use your argument".

As for the "unwatched pages", I feel misrepresented. It looks like this is about "unused" templates (with a strange twist of wording), which could easily be deleted without changing anything to the argument.

Etcetera. -DePiep (talk) 09:41, 13 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Breaking {sfn}

It appears that {{sfn}} is broken now to accomodate/enforce the outcome (see helium). (Couldn't find the actual template page edited; anyone knows?).

However, this is inacceptable. After a deprecation, it is up to the handler (could be the closer or a bot or AWB or manual), but blanket-breaking the pages is unacceptable. I request reversal of the break. Noting "deprecated" is enough, then in this case a bot should do the cleanup. -DePiep (talk) 09:15, 13 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What is broken in helium, other than the citations that are missing last names and showing errors? There were some recent changes to Module:Citation/CS1; part was reverted do to a bug. --  Gadget850 talk 11:06, 13 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements#The citation trick has stopped working. --  Gadget850 talk 12:37, 13 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Long term

In the long term, such citation metatdata should be held in Wikidata, once, and can then be used by any of our projects. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:09, 26 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Agree as should the PMID. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:19, 26 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
meta:Grants:IdeaLab/Reform of citation structure for all Wikimedia projects is a directory of every citation reform proposal I have seen and all of them point to this idea. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:26, 26 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I used template:cite journal and nothing happened

The deprecation notice says that the current template is deprecated and that {{cite journal|doi= }} is a replacement. I used this template in several articles, and nothing happpened - the missing details were not completed even after several weeks. See, for instance, fair item assignment. I think this is a good reason to put the deprecation on hold, until there is a sufficiently good replacement. --Erel Segal (talk) 07:14, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Since User:Citation bot is currently blocked and unmaintained, nothing happens when {{cite doi}} is used either. So "dedeprecating" {{cite doi}} would not solve the problem. What is meant by "please use the {{cite journal|doi= }} template instead", is to use a completely filled out template that includes the doi created by WP:REFTOOLS, Wikipedia template filling, or some similar tool. Boghog (talk) 07:26, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Which would be great if the explanation given on the project page actually said that, which it currently does not: if you go ahead and try to use {{cite journal|doi= }} and put a doi number in the correct parameter, all you get in the reflist is a blue doi number and an error indicating that the title is missing (because the {{cite journal}} template requires a completed title parameter). So then maybe you go to one of the other links you mentioned: the wmflabs link doesn't accept the doi parameter at all (making it utterly useless here as an alternative to {{cite doi}}) and the reftag.appspot.com page generates a citation with the author's name and year based on the doi but still generates no title parameter, meaning it creates the same error in the reflist, never mind that it too apparently leaves out all the other pertinent information that is available directly from the doi. As near as I can tell, blocking and deciding to no longer maintain the citation bot has only crippled the ability of editors to generate full citations from a simple doi. I hope it has made something better somewhere else, but it had done nothing to make them better here. I have read over the autofill function supposedly available under reftools 2.0, but for christ's sake, I am not a computer programmer, I am just an editor wanting to generate a citation and I do not have the necessary certification in javascript to figure all that out! No editor should have to! {{cite doi}} was simple, and generated a complete citation, without all of the extra confusing work. I feel hobbled. I know I am not alone. KDS4444Talk 09:18, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry you're having trouble. Citation bot was very useful, but its maintainer stopped updating it and stopped fixing bugs a while ago, and then it started blanking complete articles, so it had to be blocked. The WMF is working on taking over maintenance of the article. Until then, you can copy and paste the example {{cite journal}} template from that template's page, then copy and paste the title, authors, and other information into the appropriate parameters. There are other, fancier options, like RefToolbar, but if you haven't been able to figure out how to use them, copy and paste works well. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:54, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of useful template

This is over a year since the discussion closed, but I am now being affected by the deprecation of this template through changes to an increasing number of articles on my watch list and thus becoming aware of the discussion. Though I understand where they're coming from, I find the arguments for the deprecation of this template unpersuasive.

Most especially, in practice, this template was deprecated due to the reading of one editor (Gigs) who closed the discussion based on his or her own interpretation of strength of argument. Because this discussion hasn't really started to affect a wide number of editors until much later, it is effectively a fait accompli that is practically difficult to challenge.

The closer made a determination of consensus based on strength of argument, finding that the position that had a minority of !votes had consensus. My understanding is that that should only happen in a case in which one side is clearly misapplying policy while the other is clearly applying policy correctly. I don't think that's the case here (and can go into detail why if necessary), so I think that the appropriate determination should pretty clearly have been no consensus, which would result in the template not being deprecated.

Is it best to open a new RfC on this? Or to challenge the closure more than a year later? Or something else? —Alex (Ashill | talk | contribs) 18:07, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • I commented at WikiProject Medicine. Additional options could including calling for an RfC, getting opinions from other WikiProjects, or having people summarize the many opinions which have already been given on this issue. The change is complicated and I think more discussion is reasonable to request. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:37, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • a new RfC--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:43, 4 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am still very supportive of deprecating this template. It is useful to have more data within the wikitext I find. If their is significant opposition we could limit the bot to just medicine, anatomy, and pharmaceutical topics. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:44, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Alex, numerical majority has little to do with consensus, and you are mistaken if you think the majority should always carry after removing blatantly invalid votes. If you look at the nature of the votes, you will note that many of the issues raised by opposers were tangential, for example the application of CSD to the template raised by one opposer. That said, I have little opinion one way or another on this matter, so feel free to raise a new RfC. Just take care in crafting it so that the results are more clear cut and the closer has an easier job, this RfC did wind up wandering around some which made interpreting the results more difficult. Gigs (talk) 03:01, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm - I agree that the discussion became too broad. Ashill, could you briefly state the reasons why you like this template? Is the argument to make Wikitext more readable, or is there something more? Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:15, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Bluerasberry:I like the template for two main reasons. One is that it makes the wikitext more readable, and the other is that it makes it very easy to add an accurate journal citation; copy and paste the doi, enter the template name, and you're done (with a bot taking care of the details if that source hasn't yet been cited). Also, the bot tends to have many fewer typos than I do in incorporating the metadata, which leads to more accurate citations. This leaves editors with more time to focus on content and less to worry about citation metadata. —Alex (Ashill | talk | contribs) 01:04, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Gigs: I disagree with your interpretation. I find your closing statement to be a helpful (though debatable) contribution to the discussion, not an assessment of anything like a consensus. I may make a point by point comment in response to your closure later. But your main justification was that this is using a template to store article content. However, that point was made by only one editor (no other editor, as far as I can tell, explicitly agreed with that point) and sensibly rebutted by a number of other editors. (To me, the strongest point made in rebuttal is that the doi or pmid is a unique and permanent identifier that fully identifies the source; the cite doi templates are just holding metadata that is important for human readers of the page but is not really article content.) So it's impossible to identify a policy-based consensus based on that point. —Alex (Ashill | talk | contribs) 01:14, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Ashill.
Initially, when I started writing in Wikipedia, I didn't add citations to my articles because it was too difficult and tiring. I wanted to focus on writing content - not on copying&pasting technical details. Then, someone told me about Cite doi. Suddenly, adding citations became so easy! Just copy&paste a single number. I began adding citations everywhere. My articles became much better.
Then, one day I discovered that this template has been deprecated. Like Ashill, I didn't have a chance to participate in the discussion; I only learned about it when I saw changes to my articles in my watch list (some of them contained mistakes). So I tried to use other alternatives, such as using "citation" and waiting for a bot to complete the details, but this didn't work. Adding citations again became too tiring and cumbersome. I found myself refraining from adding citations to my articles because of the time it takes and the mess it creates in the article.
Finally, I decided to go back to using cite DOI. I figured out it is better to use a deprecated template, than to not have citations at all.
In general, adding citations is very important for Wikipedia's goals. Based on its importance, I think we should do everything to make it as easy as possible to cite. --Erel Segal (talk) 21:21, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Another reason I oppose the deprecation is that it encourages users to "fix" my articles in a way that makes them incorrect. For example, here a user replaced my correct but deprecated "cite isbn", with "cite book" which is not deprecated but incorrect (he missed the name of the second author). This is not the first time it happens. This is very frustrating. I put a lot of effort in writing correct citations, and I have to put extra effort in order to monitor these unwanted changes. --Erel Segal (talk) 22:37, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Right, the deprecation of this template was made without the participation of most of those it would affect and then was applied to templates like {{cite isbn}} whose users were not even informed that a discussion was taking place—there was no notice of the discussion on the talk pages of any of those templates. What kind of "consensus" is that? Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 22:47, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Are you talking about the RFC above? There was a pretty broad discussion of views there. The main issue was how the template functioned, namely the creation of Category:Cite doi templates. It was not for the deletion of the template overall (well it was but its functionality was unique). I'm not sure cite isbn or other templates function in the same way. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 00:07, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The points are that (a) users who were affected by the outcome of the RfC had no idea there was an RfC until after people started going around replacing the templates; and (b) the results of this RfC have been applied to {{cite isbn}} and other templates—all of a sudden all the articles I used {{cite isbn}} on were having them removed and it took some work to figure out why—because the discussion did not happen on {{cite isbn}} and there was no notice of the RfC on the {{cite isbn}} talk page. The subst-ing of the templates has been sloppy, creating clean-up work for those of us who think the subst-ing never should have happened in the first place. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 00:17, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There is clear consensus to remove this templates within the topic area of WPMED at least [2]. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 00:37, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's what's known as a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS—it cannot be applied outside that locality without a higher-level consensus, and any higher-level consensus will override the lower one, so the WPMED consensus doesn't mean a whole lot. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 02:03, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
To state the obvious, the global consensus is the sum of local consensuses. The overall consensus which included the WP:MED consensus was to deprecate. There is no higher level consensus that contradicts that consensus. Boghog (talk) 02:25, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
"To state the obvious", WP:LOCALCONSENSUS exists because of people like you, Boghog states the opposite. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 08:21, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I see two separate issues. First is whether there every was consensus to deprecate this template, which may technically require a closure challenge. Second is the substance of whether the template should be deprecated. The first only matters in that if there is no consensus on the second point, the default would currently be to go back to deprecating the template, whereas if there never was a consensus to deprecate, a new no consensus to deprecate would mean that the template would not be deprecated, I think. I'm not sure whether it's worth challenging the previous consensus determination, but I propose this RfC text:

Following this discussion in mid-2014, there was a determination of consensus that the cite doi template should be deprecated. Now, a bot is making large-scale substitutions of the template in article space, bringing this to the attention of more editors. Should the cite doi template be deprecated?

Do others think that that question is likely to lead to useful discussion? Any suggested tweaks? I think it's worth getting the question right before discussing the answer. —Alex (Ashill | talk | contribs) 01:25, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • I'm sorry but if someone who depended on this template wasn't watching this template's talk page, or any of the other RFC notifications or the prior CFD-related discussion, I'm not sure what to say. The discussion passed for over a month and the only arguments I'm seeing here were the same as before: namely, the fact that some people found it useful. Depreciation is technically going to happen anyways since the bot is no longer creating new doi subpages and at the moment it's just a matter of people figuring out which if any of the 60k or so now subpages are orphaned. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 03:11, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Some people find it useful" is a sufficiently important consideration since it encourages editors to use citations in their articles, which is important for Wikipedia's basic goals.
  • Even without a bot, it is better to have a citation in one template page which can be used in many articles, than to duplicate the citation many times. This is what templates are for. --Erel Segal (talk) 07:28, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd say keeping the text in the article encourages more users to use citations that "hey, if you want to cite a journal, type in cite doi | journal identification information and citation bot (if or when it comes back) will take that information and create a separate subpage that will then store the contents there under a cite journal wrapper". Why not have citation bot operate like we do with fixing bare urls, namely filling in the details in the article itself, not this hidden secret subpage routine? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:27, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Ricky81682: Templates are tools. I don't watch templates that I use regularly unless something changes that stops making them useful, and I don't watch request for comments lists either. As far as I can recall, notifications about this discussion were not posted to WT:Astronomy or any of the astronomy articles, which are most of the articles which use papers with dois as references that I watch. And the suggestion that editors who don't watch those RfC lists and template talk pages have no right to object when a consensus determined through that propose starts widely affecting articles and topic areas to which no notification was posted is inconsistent with policy and practice. Frankly, the arguments I see in favor of deprecating the template boil mostly down to WP:IDONTLIKEIT or assertions which I believe are erroneous, though I agree that the arguments against deprecation in the RfC do admittedly boil down to WP:ILIKEIT. RfC rather than rehashing discussion too much. As noted, templates exist to be useful, so I don't see why "some find it useful" isn't a good reason to keep a template around. I'll say why in a new
The shutdown of the DOI bot was certainly a frustrating development that (like deprecating this template) threw the baby out with the bathwater, though I see that there is now an attempt to resurrect the manual part of the bot for use with the cite doi template: User talk:Citation bot#Citation bot progress. —Alex (Ashill | talk | contribs) 14:05, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Start a new RFC if you want. My point to the discussion was that this template's construction (namely by burying the details of the citations into hidden subpages) was not helpful to new editors who would have to learn how this thing worked, created tens of thousands of unwatched subpages that could be subject to very sneaky unseen vandalism and ran completely counter to how everything else we teach editors to do when it comes to citing sources: namely it makes it close to impossible to verify and fix citations. The fact that the bot adds tens of thousands of text into the pages isn't unusual: if that information was cited to books, to webpages, to newspapers, to other journals, even to doi articles that didn't use this system, that text (and I do consider flat text citation details as text) would be in the article. The fact that some people prefer this vastly more complicated scheme that they understand is nice but I'm more concerned about a new or even relatively experienced user trying to figure out how to work out a citation and setting up systems that require basically extensive programming knowledge just to understand that cite doi | whatever must means you need to figure out how to access the correct template and then from there to edit that text is one of the reasons I see for the complete drop off in new users. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:22, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes it was a complicated template that made WP much harder to edit for new users. Hiding all details about a ref on a subpage is a pain for long term editors aswell. References are one of the most important things we have and they should not be shuffled off to some hidden unwatched template. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:32, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Too bad this isn't nothing new though. One of these days I want to get rid of the massively esoteric Harry Potter and Middle Earth citation templates. The level of walled gardens people love to create for their own creations is nothing new here. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 22:36, 6 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Protected edit request on 5 September 2015

Add {{subst:tfd}} to the top of the template. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:26, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion moved to TdD page
I do not think we are proposing deletion? We are just proposing deprecation. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:24, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
WP:Templates for discussion/Log/2015 September 5#Template:Cite doi. Deletion seems abrupt to me, and there are 628 occurrences in "what links here" for articles. Johnuniq (talk) 06:24, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Deletion is certainly premature. If for no other reason, this template should be retained for historical reasons (it is linked in a large number of discussions). In addition, this template could have a useful future purpose. For example, if instead of creating transcluded templates, if Citation Bot would replace instances of {{cite doi}} with fully filled out {{cite journal}} templates, this would provide editors with an easy way of adding citations. Boghog (talk) 06:40, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with User:Boghog Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:18, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
These points need to be made at the TfD page I linked. Johnuniq (talk) 08:15, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have added the {{subst:tfd}} to the templates documentation page which I think is adequate. Boghog (talk) 08:47, 5 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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