Template talk:Bluebook website

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Bluebook website template.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

This template is part of WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases, a collaborative effort to improve articles related to Supreme Court cases and the Supreme Court. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page.U.S. Supreme Court casesWikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court casesTemplate:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court casesU.S. Supreme Court articles

Law

This template is within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardised, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and the subjects encompassed by it.LawWikipedia:WikiProject LawTemplate:WikiProject Lawlaw articles

Timestamp

If someone more skilled then myself has time, the 20th edition of Bluebook requires a timestamp for access-dates for citations of internet sources. Here is an example from the quick reference of the correct date format: (Jan. 29, 2009, 10:04 AM),

Noting the comma after the year, no period for the AM and the comma after the parenthetical. It's not a huge deal, but Bluebook is a very demanding citation system, and it would be nice to have the precise format available. Seraphimsystem (talk) 18:21, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Lack of support for archival information

I recently wrote the article Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach (2013). After I had published my first draft, it came to my attention that I was supposed to use Bluebook citations, so I went back and changed out {{cite journal}} and some instances of {{cite web}}/{{cite news}} to {{bluebook journal}} and {{bluebook website}} respectively. I ran into a problem, though, with sources that included archival links. Consider, for instance:

Musgrave, Jane (2014-03-27). "Federal judge refuses to order Riviera Beach to pay Fane Lozman to replace destroyed floating home". The Palm Beach Post. Archived from the original on 2022-04-07. Retrieved 2022-04-07.

Both the fact that the current source is paywalled and the fact that an archive exists would be obscured. Now, I could get around the latter half by separately using {{webarchive}} (although that throws a warning when linking to newspapers.com, but that's a separate issue I guess), but we'd still lose the information that the primary link is paywalled. There's various other metadata conveyed in {{cite web}}/{{cite news}} that is useful as well, such as source language and quotes. (I wound up just including a quote manually after {{bluebook journal}} at one point.)

My question—and I'll pose it now to Wugapodes, or later at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Legal if they're not around to answer—is: Is the omission of these parameters specifically because of the peculiarities of Bluebook citation format, or can some/all of them be safely added? If the former, is there any way to compromise at least on the URL metadata? Say, an additional plain-English sentence after the formal citation? ("URL is subscription-only; archived version exists at ...".) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 22:17, 7 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tamzin: I haven't checked the Bluebook but given their, er, more archaic and legalistic stylings I doubt they have guidance on archival links and paywall information. That said, I think it's a good idea to add them to the template even if it's not perfect Bluebook. We're an online encyclopedia, not a law review, so taking a few liberties when it serves our purpose is reasonable. I'll let you know when I have a sandbox draft ready. — Wug·a·po·des 18:47, 8 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tamzin: I've got it set up in the sandbox. You can see a few examples at Template:Bluebook website/testcases. Let me know your thoughts so I can update the template or revise as needed. — Wug·a·po·des 00:02, 9 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Wugapodes: Thanks for getting to this so quickly! Two questions/thoughts:

Is the comma before "(last updated)"/"(last visited)" (present in the live version as well) a bug or a feature?
Could we also include a |url-status= like the CS1 templates have? Then if set to "dead", the primary link changes to that and "original link" appears where "archived copy" would. And then for "usurped"/"unfit", just the archived link as primary without an "original link", maybe?

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 00:40, 9 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tamzin (1) bug, now fixed (2) sure, see Template:Bluebook website/testcases for those changes as well. (3) as a bonus, I've added error messages while I was in there which respect a user's cs1-* CSS settings. — Wug·a·po·des 22:08, 9 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Wugapodes: Looks great! Thanks so much! One more thing is, should this format dates based on page-level MDY/DMY preferences like CS1 does? Doesn't need to happen now; I was planning to do it myself at some point anyways, but since we're here, might as well bring it up. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 19:35, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Tamzin I'm not sure that's possible in template syntax since the only information available is what's passed to the template. Lua modules have access to more data which is why I think CS1 is able to interpret page-level date preferences. Having the option to format dates would be useful though, and it could be something to add even if not automatically interpreted from the page-level info. I started using {{date}} for formatting which takes an output format. Having that be a parameter sounds like a simple-enough change. — Wug·a·po·des 19:41, 10 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]