Template talk:Find sources

This talk page is intended for discussion of technical aspects of the Find sources template. For discussions relating to content and links, see Module talk:Find sources

Brainstorming: calling the module twice for dual projects

There has previously been discussion about what to do when an article is a member of two projects, e.g. Marie Curie is a member of WP:MEDICINE and WP:BIOGRAPHY. Previous discussion has centered upon the fact that the possible conflict between two projects is a negative, and how should we resolve it? It occurs to me that we needn't resolve it, and should reframe it as a feature, not a bug. The template could be modified to invoke the module twice, once for each project. This might raise additional questions, such as, should we throttle the max number of search domains for which a links banner could be generated, and if so, should that be a hard limit, or configurable (e.g., |maxdomains=2)? The way the template is currently designed, such a modification would be very easy to carry out. Mathglot (talk) 00:04, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

"FENS"/"TWL" acronyms

"FENS" is an internal term that would not be well known by the people who are the primary intended audience for the "find sources" bit, same with "TWL", though one does get the notification when they are eligible for that one so it's not quite as insider baseball. They have abbr annotations, but would it be that unreasonable to expand them to "Newspapers" and "The Wikipedia Library"? I don't think it would be a crime to have the section span two lines instead of one if need be. Remsense留 16:49, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Future design of this template

This discussion found consensus for changing the template to include search engines of news titles/scholarly articles, instead of listing them individually. I am looking forward to your proposals to implement it, or even replacing it with {{Search for}} and modifying it if needed. I don't know much about coding, but I am willing to help Szmenderowiecki (talk) 21:46, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

Robustness design upgrade suggested

The core project WikiProject detection code takes place in subtemplates /proj/is med, /proj/is biography, /proj/is video. These subtemplates are working, but they are built using regular expressions and a stronger method is available now since the introduction of template {{HasTemplate}} based on new module functionality. The upshot of this, is that we now have a more powerful tool for determining the presence of the WikiProject templates, and all three subtemplates should be converted to use {{HasTemplate}}, and avoid use of regular expressions which by their nature are more fragile, as well as being more difficult to maintain. Another reason to use the new template is the redirects issue. The WP:MED WikiProject for example, has a dozen redirects, leading to more regex code in the subtemplate (/doc section proj/is med#Notes addresses this) and this could and should be replaced with {{HasTemplate}} as a robustness improvement which will also make future modifications easier and more bulletproof. Mathglot (talk) 20:49, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

WP Refs description

(updated)
Change description of WP Refs from 'a Google search that only searches sites vetted by Wikipedians' to 'a Google search limited to hundreds of higher-quality sources' Superb Owl (talk) 17:19, 12 June 2024 (UTC)

Chatbots as valid sources or identifiers of them

Your feedback would be appreciated at Module talk:Find sources#Chatbots as valid sources or identifiers of them. Mathglot (talk) 04:58, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Incorrect parsing when title contains a slash

Moved from Template talk:Talk header § Find sources templates appears to be incorrectly parsing article names at times

I noticed when looking at the talk page header for the Talk:AC/DC article, the find sources template was pointing me to search queries that just contained 'DC' as opposed to 'AC/DC'. It appears that when there's a slash, the parsing might only include the last token. I wanted to fix this myself but couldn't seem to find where exactly the article name was being extracted. Aurangzebra (talk) 04:21, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

This template could pass |title= or the default can be edit requested on Module talk:Find sources. The code currently chooses to use title.subpageText. 174.89.12.36 (talk) 07:40, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Aurangzebra, thanks for bringing this up. This does not surprise me at all, and I'm sure the problem is not with find-sources; although where the problem is exactly remains to be seen after further analysis, and may require some technical help. But first, I wanted to give you some background about slashes in titles.

An important thing to know when starting out analyzing this is that slashes are handled completely differently in mainspace titles and Talk space titles. In main space, a slash is just a regular character; the title AC/DC is just a title, it does not mean the 'DC' subpage of page 'AC'. But the Talk page Talk:AC/DC is not the same, and is actually a subpage, namely of page Talk:AC. You can see this in the breadcrumbs at the top of the Talk page, which links to the completely unrelated Talk page Talk:AC, whereas the main page has no such breadcrumbs.

Another way to see this, is to use magic words like {{SUBPAGENAME}} and {{BASEPAGENAME}}, and compare how they react in each space:

• The basepagename of AC/DC is AC/DC and the subpagename is AC/DC.
• The basepagename of Talk:AC/DC is AC and the subpagename is DC.

So you can see how they are not being treated the same. The {{Talk header}} template at the top of the Talk page is passing the title of the subpage it is on, namely, the 'DC' subpage of 'AC' to find-sources, and this is exactly as it should be. Suppose we had a Wikiproject, where they had a Talk page called Talk:Vital articles/Unsourced/Dadaism, and you had a talk header on it; what would you want your find-sources to search for? 'Dadaism', right? Typically you want the subpagename; that is, the right-most pagename after the last slash. So, since Talk:AC/DC is the DC subpage, that's what Template:Talk header is passing it. So, find-sources is merely doing what it is told to do in this case, which is, "find sources about 'DC'".

You might argue that in this case, that template {{Talk header}} is doing the wrong thing, and maybe it should do something like, strip out embedded slash, and pass a blank or a hyphen instead. Perhaps, but I still don't think that is right, either, as Template:Talk header is merely passing the title of the page it sees, which is DC (when it's the Talk page).

The real problem here is that the Talk page has the wrong PAGENAME, which derives from a PAGENAME that is legal in mainspace, but means something different when carried over to the Talk page. I'm not 100% certain of the right solution, but I think it could involve the use of {{DISPLAYTITLE}}, if that works in this situation. (Note that WP:Page name#Technical restrictions and limitations talks about the slash issue and gives the example of Talk:GNU/Linux naming controversy, but claims that "...this doesn't particularly cause problems", but I disagree with that, and the issue you raised is precisely one of the problems it causes.) I think what I would try next, would be to change the title of the main article "AC/DC", possibly to "AC DC" or "AC-DC", and see if it allows {{displaytitle:AC/DC}} (it might not). ... darn, just tried that (with redirects AC DC and AC\DC), and it is not allowed per WP:DISPLAYTITLE.

Since that didn't work, I don't think there is anything more to be gained here, and you need bigger guns for this. I would raise your question again at WP:VPT, linking this discussion at the top of your question with {{Discussion moved from}} or {{Courtesy link}}, depending on how you'd like to approach it. Pplease {{ping}} me from there if you do.

If that doesn't yield a solution via PAGENAME, we could brute force a find-sources hack that gives you the search results you want to see, but basically amounts to a workaround, fixing a problem whose locus is elsewhere. Hope this helps, Mathglot (talk) 05:40, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

{{alink}} behaves correctly. It uses {{ARTICLEPAGENAME}}.

SUBPAGENAME and BASEPAGENAME can be expanded into {{#titleparts}}. In Lua, that would be using mw.title.new. 174.89.12.36 (talk) 07:50, 14 September 2024 (UTC)