Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 12

Cite web needs a section parameter
We need a section parameter in cite web. We used to have better support for this, it seems to have been "rationalised".

I'm just trying to reference a PDF hundreds of pages long. It has chapters and legalistic paragraph or section numbering, yet it's not published except on the web, it has no ISBN, it's not a "book". section or chapter annotation would be useful and appropriate here. Merging the section numbers into the title (as suggested) breaks downstream metadata handling. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:38, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
 * This cite? So what if it doesn't have an ISBN?  That source is book length, has chapters, and pages, is in electronic form which would seem to pass the duck test for an e-book.  Therefore, use.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:03, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Similar issues arise with books and other documents. Rather than sections or chapters, a more general solution might be to allow at to co-exist with page/pages.  In this case, one would write Rule 184.3208.  In others, it would be Table 3.1 or Map 9 in conjunction with a page number.  Kanguole 14:05, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
 * at would work for me (better than calling something that isn't a book a book). I tried that, but it's either/or with pages.
 * Incidentally (AIUI) this isn't a book and can't be readily bought as a book. That itself is a source of some annoyance to those who'd like to be able to buy it as a bound paper book, but instead keep ending up with ragged printouts. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:15, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
 * If you just dislike calling it a book, use Citation, with CS1 if you must scatter stops everywhere. :-) Peter coxhead (talk) 22:23, 21 February 2016 (UTC)


 * A section parameter would be useful only in those cases (analoguous with the use of pages) where the source as a whole is a sub-unit of a larger work (such as an article in a journal, or contribution that is published separately). Where one is citing a specific section (or page) then it is best not to merge a specific detail into the full citation.  In the typical case where a source is cited only once it is quite acceptable to append the specific location after the template. Which is a tad cumbersome with {cite} as you have defeat the automatic terminal punctuation (with none). And another reason for using {citation}. Or (as Peter suggests) CS1. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:05, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Proper use of Website not explained.
From the CS1 messages it appears that it is not proper to use a URL in the website= entry for cite web. I think that needs to be *much* better explained if that is a problem. A would expect a new user to be much more likely to do than. IMO, *either* website= needs to be specifically added to both Help:CS1 errors (which doesn't show website as one that would be a problem and the docs on Cite web, or this CS1 error needs to be disabled.Naraht (talk) 21:13, 22 February 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by ‎Naraht (talk • contribs) 19:45, 22 February 2016

That's adequate in my opinion. Any more would be unwarranted instruction creep, and people do need to learn to use the doc that's available to them. ― Mandruss  &#9742;  21:50, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * In the doc for the templates, the description of website says "title of the website". I don't see how that could be interpreted as URL.
 * Of the multiple occurrences of website in the Examples section, none show a URL.
 * The error shows website as the problem parameter.
 * The error description lists several problem parameters and says "or any of their aliases". The doc shows that website is an alias of work, which is one of the parameters listed in the error description.
 * I've calmed down now. I agree that the docs are as good as they could be, but it is still a fairly likely mistake. Any ideas that may help?Naraht (talk) 15:25, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I've added the aliases to Help:CS1 errors. This is about users who don't read the template documentation, but adapt existing examples and are then confused by error messages.  The first documentation they encounter is a subsection of Help:CS1 errors that is linked from the error.  Kanguole 15:54, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Status of filtering square brackets in URLs
Are we planning to handle brackets in URLs? I found an article (at redirect "EAPPI") where the "url=" contains sets of single brackets ("[...]") and should be encoded by a Lua filter (as '%7b' and '%7d' values?). Apparently those are very rare inside a URL, but they should be filtered by the Lua module, some day. This problem goes back 15 years due to the poor design of the MediaWiki markup language which should have used 2-character tokens to denote an external URL link, such as with both angle+square brackets, "<[http:...]>" rather than just single brackets "[http...]" as now unable to include each ']' inside a URL address. Anyway, 15 years later, now the cite templates should handle "[...]" inside each URL parameter. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:37, 27 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Technically, unencoded single brackets are actually forbidden in the path part of a URL according to the URL specification. Of course, in practice anything is allowed provided that browsers and servers support it.  Wikipedia also have issues with angle brackets ("<", ">") breaking urls.  There might be other examples too.  Dragons flight (talk) 12:39, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The embedded brackets "[...]" are so rare, it can wait to be handled, along with other URL characters. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:00, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Forbidden in the path part yes, but I think that they are legal in the query string. When used there they will still break the MediaWiki parsing: I have come across examples of such use in the past, occasionally when somebody posts to VPT with "why doesn't my URL work?". -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:53, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Here's an example of a URL containing square brackets (from Pass Me By (R5 song)) that does not render correctly:

We should probably do something to either render this reasonably or flag it as an error. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:41, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Following up on a comment at 2 modules weekend of 20–21 February 2016:


 * For a very long time, the template docs have advised editors to percent-encode certain characters when they occur in a url; see Template:Cite_book for the list. :Characters allowed in the various parts of a url are defined in Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax.  Essentially, the characters defined in the table at Template:Cite_book must be percent-encoded when used in the path portion of a url (not allowed in the scheme and domain parts).


 * That leaves us three options:
 * ignore the content and make up of the url path – this is what we do now
 * detect the presence of these characters in the url path and then emit an error message
 * detect the presence of these characters in the url path and then percent encode them
 * What do?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 18:31, 14 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I think option 1 is not good, since the citation renders quite poorly.


 * We have been encouraged many times on this page to pursue option 3, i.e. be permissive in what we accept, even if it is technically invalid. Our historical practice in most cases has been option 2, detect input that does not comply with guidelines and emit an error messages, letting human editors fix the errors.


 * If option 3 (reliably detect and replace) is technically feasible, I recommend it. If not, option 2 (emit an error message). – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:54, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I'll explore the latter two options after the next update.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:29, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I too would prefer option 3. The FAQ database on various Konica Minolta web sites is another example of urls containing square brackets (see f.e. http://www.konicaminoltasupport.com/index.php?id=4569&L=2 ).
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:03, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

I've added a bit of code to  so that square brackets occurring in the path portion of a url are percent encoded.

Because the module creates a label from url when title is missing or empty, the label it creates is not encoded:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:13, 22 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Looks good to me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:56, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:51, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Template Cite episode undocumented parameter / error
In researching the answer to the query above, I discovered that the city parameter in this template doesn't seem to function, nor is it documented. Would someone investigate, please? &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  23:56, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

This comparison is the current Lua version against the last version:

city was removed from with ; three years before the Lua conversion.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 01:20, 24 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I've edited the documentation to reflect the deletion. The parameter no longer appears in the documentation. Is this template part of any tools that you know of that need to be checked?
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  01:34, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

multiple author names in |author= and aliases
One of the things that I noticed recently while cleaning up is that there are a lot of cs1|2 templates that use author to hold multiple author names. This is semantically incorrect and I can't see in our documentation that we explicitly permit multiple author names in a last alias – yeah, that practice isn't specifically proscribed either but should be. The simple fix is to change author to authors but that's not really a fix. It's not a fix because authors is not made part of the metadata:

I've added code to  that calls a new function   which counts the number of separator characters (comma and semicolon). If there is more than one of these characters in a last alias then the page is added to a new (not yet existing) maintenance category:

the same applies to editor-last aliases:

I don't know how many of these kinds of improper uses there are but I'm guessing that there are a lot of them. Fixing these will be a task similar to the (still incomplete) coauthor(s) task. I suspect that a bot can cleanup the low-hanging fruit by converting these kinds of parameters to vauthors or to individual authorn parameters. When that is done, we should then convert this code so that it emits an error message. —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:32, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * What is your plan for corporate authors that have two or more commas as part of their name? Jc3s5h (talk) 17:27, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Examples?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:48, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It's obvious that corporations and partnerships can choose names that include several commas. You're the one that wants to make the templates harder to use; you should prove there are no legitimate institutional names that contain more than one comma. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:09, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It might be something like Abel, Baker, Charley and partners -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:36, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * So no examples then? [Proving] there are no legitimate institutional names that contain more than one comma is a bit like proving that Russell's teapot doesn't exist, isn't it?  You have claimed that these names exist so the burden to prove that is yours.
 * But, to forestall a pointless discussion about orbiting crockery and the like, I will stipulate that such corporate names exist. I can think of no better way to know if author has more than one author name assigned to it.  Can you?  The method won't find the cases where two names are separated a single separator character (A. Smith, B. Jones) so it is just as likely that the method will find names that legitimately have multiple separators.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:42, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * My suggestion is don't implement unreliable checks and make editors do unnecessary troubleshooting when there is really nothing wrong with an author's name. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:39, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * So no idea for a better method then?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:24, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Trappist, are you seriously trying to claim that there are no corporate or partnership names with more than one comma in them? We have articles here on Adelson, Testan, Brundo & Jimenez – Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz – Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine – Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner – Robinson, Silverman, Pearce, Aronsohn, and Berman – Sullivan, Papain, Block, McGrath, & Cannavo – to pick a few examples found from briefly poking around some likely categories. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:02, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * No.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:24, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree that no parameter (except in vcite) should have multiple authors. However, is it proper or useful for the cs code the enforce this? It seems to me this is not such a great problem that the cs code needs to be further complicated in a quest to Right All (citation) Wrongs. An occassional run with a special purpose bot would suffice. And then Trappist would have little more time to expand the none feature. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:09, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't mind a maintenance category, with the understanding that there is not yet a consensus for "fixing" the condition identified. The description of the category, and the linked help text, could make it clear that this message is merely a tracking category to identify the scale of this type of parameter usage and to look for potential false positives that could be used to refine the error check. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:04, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, sounds like a reasonable approach to me. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:50, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, sounds like a reasonable approach to me. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:50, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

For those cases where any single entity's name requires multiple separators, we can employ a similar trick that is used in vauthors to instruct the module to skip the multiple names test:

The doubled parentheses must wrap the entire parameter value. If they do not, then they are not stripped from the rendering:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:11, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I think we should avoid introduction of such type of text (vauthors excepted, of course) since there's no demonstrable consensus above for editing the articles which exhibit this concern. As with Jonesey and Matthias, I think a maintenance category is desirable. --Izno (talk) 14:18, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Unrecognized language
Is there some reason that Filipino is triggering the unrecognized language error message? It's a valid language with the code [fil], apparently. Maybe some list needs to be updated? &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  14:25, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * is not an ISO 639-1 code which is a requirement of language. Neither of   nor Filipino are recognized by MediaWiki.  See names.php for the current list of supported language names and codes.  Consider Tagalog.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:39, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * More confusing information, then. If you look at the entry for Tagalog at List of ISO 639-1 codes, you find the following in the Notes column:
 * Note: Filipino (Pilipino) has the code [fil]
 * Apparently ISO 639-1 is limited to two-letter codes, although they have three-letter codes under ISO 639-2. In skimming the Wikipedia articles on Tagalog and Filipino, apparently Filipino is the standardized version of Tagalog. That's all well and good, but shouldn't we be accommodating to what people want to call their own language? I can't see us editing every citation that lists Filipino as a language to read Tagalog instead. I realize this isn't your circus, nor your monkeys, but once again I'm up against not knowing how to effect a change. How does one request that Mediawiki adopt the ISO 639-2 standard to be more inclusive? Should one even bother?
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  23:27, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * What the reader sees when you use Filipino is (in Filipino). When Module:Citation/CS1 doesn't recognize the content of language, it does categorize the page and, for those who have turned on messaging, shows the maintenance category message.  Maintenance messages are not necessarily error messages.


 * When I introduced ISO 639-1 as an option, I created a table of all of the ISO 639-1 . I abandoned that when I discovered the Scribunto library function  .  It works well enough for ISO 639-1 and to some extent with ISO-639-2.  The library fails for ISO 639-2 codes what also have an ISO 639-1 code.  The library appears to use the same data set as the magic word  .  As an example,
 * – ISO 639-1
 * – ISO 639-2
 * returns 'Icelandic' but when the language code is, it returns.
 * That 'anomaly' was sufficient for me to not attempt to support ISO 639-2.
 * returns 'Icelandic' but when the language code is, it returns.
 * That 'anomaly' was sufficient for me to not attempt to support ISO 639-2.


 * The other issue that comes to mind is categorizing. Module:Citation/CS1 categorizes all templates that use language (except English).  For the ISO-639-1 languages there are 185 of these categories.  There are some 500-ish ISO 639-2 language codes 185 of which duplicate ISO 639-1 codes.  Supporting all of them might be more work than it is worth.


 * I have thought, on and off, of supporting certain ISO 639-2 codes where those codes or their associated language names appear commonly in ;  and Filipino would be one such example.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 00:57, 24 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I would definitely support that solution. I agree that supporting an additional 300+ language codes is burdensome and unnecessary, but since ISO 639-1 isn't ever likely to include Filipino, it would be great to add it to our list somehow. Thanks for your very educational response!
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  19:04, 24 February 2016 (UTC)


 * In perusing the pages in the maintenance category, I've found two anomalies already.
 * If the language in language is Wikilinked, the maintenance tag is added, as in.
 * If the language is the English equivalent, it may trigger the maintenance tag, as in
 * While the first example is easily fixed by unlinking the language (although that's a pain), the second is more problematical. Purging the page cache removes the green maintenance tag notifications, but doesn't remove the page from the category. The relevant article is 1. FSV Mainz 05. Other articles using  don't fall into the maintenance category, though, see Attila.
 * Something goofy is obviously going on, but don't ask me what. It would seem that there are numerous pages in the category that don't belong there.
 * 19:28, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * At the last update of Module:Citation/CS1 a bug in the code caused the  to improperly categorize proper and correct language names (not codes) as unrecognized.  That has been fixed.  MediaWiki sometimes takes its time when removing pages from a category.  The usual solution is to simply wait for MediaWiki to get around to doing whatever it is that needs doing to remove the page from the category.  After all, there are thousands of us all making little modifications which all need MediaWiki's attention, so some things can be put off until later.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:58, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * A null edit will typically remove the page from the category. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:27, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

The problem in the 1. FSV Mainz 05 article was apparently the use of de icon in some raw html references. Once I converted them to Cite templates (which were widely used in the rest of the article), the page was de-listed from the Category. I'll try to remember to check back in a few days and see if the Category has been purged.

I want to expressly thank you, Trappist, for your patience and all the time you spend composing detailed, educational responses to my queries. I know I'm probably on your "HME list" (High Maintenance Editors), but I hope my wanting to improve my editing skills and Wikipedia as a whole is some sort of balance for all the energy you expend. You're very much appreciated! Thank you. &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  21:51, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
 * If that were the problem, you would see the category and the error message when looking at the previous version of the article in the article's History. I do not see the category or the error message. Your edits forced the page to reload all of the templates in the page, which is what fixed the category membership.


 * Standardizing the citations was the right thing to do, but it was not related to this discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:54, 24 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Since I'm mostly clueless about this stuff, all I can do is relate my actions and wait for someone to explain what impact they did or didn't have. I appreciate the education!
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  23:03, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Author titles or jobs
A lot of time, like when arguing over whether a source is from a "scholar" or not, I think listing the person's title or job at the time they wrote a book would be useful. Is it possible to have a field for that?

It seems to fall outside the bounds of |last= |first= splitting. Should we just use |author= and manually do "Last, First" ? In that case how would we format a mention of their title or job? After, before, in-between? 184.145.18.50 (talk) 20:06, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Probably not. For example, I suspect that many authors of articles in medical journals and other scholarly works are entitled to be addressed as doctor or professor; many I suspect have PhDs yet, that information is not included in citations or bibliographies.  That being the case, such titles and honoraria should not be made part of cs1|2 citations.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 20:34, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * [ec] Not a good idea. It is outside the scope of citation to evaluate the goodness, authority, relevance, etc. of the source or the author(s), and it would be a very large can worms to address anything like that in a citation. If there is any question regarding the reliability or applicability of a particular source or author in particular case that is resolved on the Talk page of the article where the question is raised. Also, job titles are very poor indicators for such purposes. Note that when Einstein published his theory of relativity he was just a clerk in a patent office. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:39, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * As a compromise, perhaps not titles and job specifications (they are just "sounds and smoke"), but direct professional affiliations or associations (if mentioned).
 * I have run into various cases, where an author's affiliation / association with a particular company or research facility (f.e. Hewlett Packard, IBM or General Electric) was prominently mentioned in an article or on a book's front cover, to the extent that this information almost had "publisher status", even though the work was published by someone else. Related research or the work itself might have been initiated and/or sponsored by the associated company. In such cases I consider an author's association a vital part of a reference, and I have seen references in books where such information was included as part of the reference.
 * I have sometimes put this information into the location parameter, but a dedicated parameter would be more desirable in order to allow automatic parsing and ensure a consistent display format. Something like author-assoc and editor-assoc (or something more generic like author-suffix and editor-suffix), displayed after the author name and separated by comma or in brackets. Like in: Doe, John, IBM; Zweistein, Willibald, CERN (2016). Title XYZ Press (Ghosttown, USA).
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:21, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It's advertising. Hewlett Packard or whoever have put up money towards the cost of producing the book, in return for getting their name on the front. The author would probably have written exactly the same book without HP's cash, but might not have found a publisher willing or interested enough to take a gamble. -- Red rose64 (talk) 00:15, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * In some cases, that might be true, in others the research or development work the book is about was funded and conducted at that company and by the author of the book, so without the company the work would not exist in the first place, and without the company's consent and approval (and perhaps endorsement) the book could not have been written as the author would typically be under NDA prohibiting him from sharing his insights with anyone outside the company.
 * Examples:
 * (Schmid was employed by General Electric when he wrote this book on decimal computation, and the book introduces him in the front matter like "Hermann Schmid, General Electric Company, Binghamton, New York" whereas the publishing company is located elsewhere. I put the company information into the location parameter, but it would certainly look more logical if the "General Electric Company" thing would immediately follow the author's name):
 * (Walther was employed by HP when he carried out the R&D work on CORDIC for the first scientific handheld electronic calculator HP-35. In that capacity he published a paper at a conference. I tried to use via and publisher to reflect this, but the result is unsatisfactory):
 * (Chen and Ho were both IBM employees when they created the so-called Chen-Ho encoding for IBM):
 * I don't see cases like these as blatant advertising, even though it may have a promotional side-effect (because of the work they did). I see this information as part of the bibliographic data that belongs into the citation somehow. In some cases, it might be possible to use the others parameter treating the company as kind of a co-author or other contributor, but this would break for multiple authors.
 * What I'm trying to say is that the OP's suggestion has some merits. Some kind of suffix parameter associated with each of the author / editor parameters could be put to good use in quite a few cases.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:20, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * location is for the town or city that the publisher is located in, not a full postal address nor anything not directly related to the company that published it. If General Electric Company have published the book - and so are named as publisher on the copyright page - then Binghamton, NY General Electric Company is valid. Otherwise, it's Hoboken, NJ John Wiley & Sons and General Electric Company don't get a mention. -- Red rose64 (talk) 12:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict)
 * As I think someone said before in a different way, this is an attempt to assert notability via citations. That's not what citations are for. Citations are a way for a reader to verify the information that is included in the article is sourced from a particular place. Their main function is the location of the information, not communicating the quality of the information. There are policies and guidelines for what can and cannot be used as a verifiable, reliable source, if the citation is included in the article one must assume that the source meets the criteria necessary for inclusion.
 * If there are disputes over sources used, they need to be resolved on the article's Talk page, not in the citations themselves. With millions of articles on this Wikipedia alone, imagine the additional space needed to include justification for a citation in every citation? The examples above include information totally superfluous to enabling a reader to locate the citation. Adding a company name to the location parameter, for example, also breaks any metadata indexing, as General Electric is not a location. Please use the templates in the way the are intended to be used:
 * As for including credentials, etc., it's also not the job of the citation to identify the qualifications of the person being cited. If we don't list Albert Einstein's accomplishments in citations, I see no reason to list anyone else's. Just my 2¢. 12:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  12:28, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * If there are disputes over sources used, they need to be resolved on the article's Talk page, not in the citations themselves. With millions of articles on this Wikipedia alone, imagine the additional space needed to include justification for a citation in every citation? The examples above include information totally superfluous to enabling a reader to locate the citation. Adding a company name to the location parameter, for example, also breaks any metadata indexing, as General Electric is not a location. Please use the templates in the way the are intended to be used:
 * As for including credentials, etc., it's also not the job of the citation to identify the qualifications of the person being cited. If we don't list Albert Einstein's accomplishments in citations, I see no reason to list anyone else's. Just my 2¢. 12:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  12:28, 26 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Yes! Citation are for identifying and locating sources, not for any kind of comment about the source or its authors. And any such misuse of the citations should be removed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:23, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Exactly so. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:42, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

Error message at preview
I'm running into this more and more as I try to clean up pages and need a way to identify the miscreant citation, please. When I press, I get a message similar to this:

Maybe I'm tired, but short of eyeballing every instance of Cite web, I don't know how to identify this. I'm sure there's a RegEx search that would help, but that is beyond my current skill set. Wouldn't this error message be better appearing next to the guilty citation in the Refs list like missing/misspelled parameter name messages? Is there some reason it doesn't? And shouldn't this be a maintenance category as well? Thanks!&mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  19:03, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
 * That error message is is not created by Module:Citation/CS1. The module does not see duplicate parameters; it gets one parameter of each name even if there are 50 of them.  The error message is created by MediaWiki.


 * There is a tool that may be helpful (I haven't used it so don't know): User:Frietjes/findargdups
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:16, 27 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I gave it a try and it failed, but I left a message at the author's Talk page. Apparently such pages are categorized, so maybe someone else will be able to fix it. I so appreciate your fount of knowledge, kind sir Trappist!
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  20:27, 27 February 2016 (UTC)


 * To find these errors efficiently, add the following code to your vector.js or monobook.js file (whichever one you use):

//Find duplicate template parameters importScript('User:Frietjes/findargdups.js'); // User:Frietjes/findargdups.js


 * Then go to the article again, click Edit, and look for the "Find dups" link in your left toolbar, under Tools. Click it, and it will tell you which template has a repeated parameter.


 * ,, and a handful of other editors have been working on emptying , which is down to about 15,000 articles from a high of well over 50,000 when the error tracking was put in place. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:41, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

More help with foreign languages
I just discovered an article where 99.9% of the citations are in Portuguese! Someone went through and changed all the parameter names, but left the foreign dates behind, which is what triggered the cleanup from me. (That was not fun, by the way.) So we have citations with valid dates and parameter names, but none of the citations use translate-title or language. Several also use the quote parameter, stuffed with Portuguese. In other words, these citations are nearly worthless on the English Wikipedia. I can't find a specific Cleanup template for this situation and wondered if anyone here had any advice on how to tag the page? Thanks!&mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  20:33, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It is helpful to provide a link to the page when you have a question like this.


 * will clean up most foreign dates in citation templates. It runs that task about once a month, so I usually fix the unsupported parameters and leave the dates in their original language.


 * You might try cleanup-translation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:00, 27 February 2016 (UTC)


 * BattyBot just ran over Category:CS1 errors: dates - did it fix the article you discovered? GoingBatty (talk) 03:22, 1 March 2016 (UTC)


 * The article is A Regra do Jogo; I fixed all the dates in the citations by hand, not really thinking about bots that would do that. Since Portuguese isn't even remotely in my wheelhouse, I had to find a translation of the names of months, lol. All's well and I'll know better next time. Thanks, and
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  03:36, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Citing the Introduction written by the editor, not the author
The book has one author and one editor. The editor wrote the Preface/Introduction, how do we cite it? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:22, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:56, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:56, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:56, 1 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:34, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Getting errors fixed
Hi, while fixing problems with errors generated by the templates I had a thought that now we know when articles are added to a category may be a BOT could be used to message those who have introduced the error. Thus giving them a chance to go and sort out the problem and so reduce the amount of entries that are in the categories. Something similar to BracketBot that reports broken wiki-mark-up or DPL bot that reports on DAB links entered in an edit. Keith D (talk) 19:57, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
 * does this notification already for most of the categories. It might need some updates for categories that have been added recently. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:01, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks the one I was thinking about was Category:CS1 errors: dates‎. Keith D (talk) 01:20, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

County based inaccessibility for cite web
Template:Cite web has registration=yes/no or subscription=yes/no to represent when a web page may not be viewable based on needing to sign up for a free or cost service.

Do we have a field to represent when neither of these is needed but a website restricts itself based upon the location of the viewer?

For example I am able to view http://www.chrgd.ca/videos/dreamworkstv-pirates-and-party-crashers/ just fine from here in Canada, but when I tried to archive it using the Wayback Machine (based in the United States) it only archived an error page.

This also happens with US/Canada cognates, when I try to view the US version of Disney Jr or Disney XD it will bounce me to the Canadian ones, which can be frustrating since they actually have different programming. Based on what I've seen from archives, the reverse also happens if US people access the Canadian site, it will bounce them to the American one.

If we do not have a field to represent country-locked URLs then could we create one? It seems like a valuable thing to note when people want to check a URL and cannot do so. These restrictions inconvenience archival (it may be hard to find a Wayback equivalent outside the US for sites not viewable from the US) and also fact-checking from editors not in the country the site exclusively serves. A field like subscription/registration to denote these would help prepare people ahead of time for that and to be able to discuss it more clearly. 184.145.18.50 (talk) 02:31, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Cite web - source code
Is there a way to cite a URL in a way that clicking the link will instead of loading the webpage as HTML instead directly bring up its source code?

I would like to do this because a page displays some information about characters when viewed live, but when I created an archived copy there is some kind of object error which prevents its display, even though it shows up just fine when viewed live.

This happens at http://web.archive.org/web/20160208130149/http://www.nickjr.co.uk/shows/wallykazam/ if you 'view source' on the archive you can see the titular character Wally's age is given as "six year old". You can see it displays as intended in the live version but the archived version gets an error which prevents people from being able to check it.

If we cannot view text directly on an archive due to problems like this, is there some way to include a note hen using template:cite web that people should 'view source' to search for a quote if the quote does not display in the archive like it did when live? 184.145.18.50 (talk) 13:17, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Place a note in the reference after the closing curly braces of the cite template. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:07, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Okay, I guess there's no "sources=yes/no" or "note=" to help standardize it though? 184.145.18.50 (talk) 02:43, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Script variants of parameters for author, editor, etc.
We have a script-title parameter for titles in foreign languages written in other scripts like Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. For obvious reasons, we need a similar mechanism for the range of author and editor parameters (because there are often many different transliterations in use and only the spelling in the original script is representative for a name). Adding script- variants may also be useful for chapter and publisher.

At present, editors often stuff both spelling variants into the author and editor parameter (or don't use the templates), putting the original representation of a name in brackets. While this usage may be acceptable for the author and editor parameters, it breaks when specifying script names (like ja:) or when using the -first and -last parameter variants. For consistency, the "script-" extension should always be the first part of the parameter name. These parameter variants should follow the same syntax and logic as the existing script-title parameter, except for displaying the name in brackets. Examples:


 * (for a title, which was only available in Russian):
 * Ryzhik, I. M. (Рыжик, И. М.); Gradshteyn, I. S. (Градштейн, И. С.) (1951). Tablitsy integralov, summ, ryadov i proizvedeniy Таблицы интегралов, сумм, рядов и произведений [Tables of integrals, sums, series, and products] (in Russian) (Third ed.). Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo Tehniko-Teoretičeskoj Literatury (Государственное издательство технико-теоретической литературы).


 * (for an English title with two Russian authors):
 * Gradshteyn, I. S. (Градштейн, И. С.); Ryzhik, I. M. (Рыжик, И. М.); Jeffrey, Alan; Zwillinger, Daniel (2007). Table of Integrals, Series, and Products (Seventh ed.). Academic Press.

Thanks. :--Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:17, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
 * We have script-chapter.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:54, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the hint. Not yet documented at Help:Citation Style 1. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 18:20, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I have meanwhile added documentation for script-chapter, but this doesn't change the fact that we still need similar script-author<-first/-last>, script-editor<-first/-last> and script-publisher parameters. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:47, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Author clarification
When filling out the 'author' (or first= and last=) in template:cite episode in association with quote= is this intended for:
 * the name of the character who is saying this thing
 * the name of the voice actor who is speaking for the character
 * the name of the writer of the script
 * some combination of the above.

Instructions for this in the template would be appreciated. I've been doing the characters so far since this seems the most useful, stuff like character's voice actors is explained in the cast and stuff like episode writers is explained in episode lists, so I personally think it ought to be the character who is saying the quote. Particularly since sometimes characters have multiple voice actors and episodes sometimes have multiple writers. 184.145.18.50 (talk) 18:30, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * The author and related parameters are intended for the author of the episode being cited, not the "author" or "speaker" of the quote parameter, which is used to optionally add a brief, relevant quotation from the cited episode. The quote parameter doesn't accommodate identifying the speaker of the quote, as everything in the parameter is enclosed in quotation marks.
 * The markup for a citation might look something like this:
 * That would display in the references list as:
 * I note that the city parameter doesn't seem to function, nor is it documented at the template. I'll open a separate topic for that below.
 * Hope this helped!
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  23:56, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Hope this helped!
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  23:56, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't really help in where we should specify the speaker, this is more important than repeating the writer who will already be identified in using title= or date= or number= since the writer will be listed on the list. Episode writers speak through the proxies of characters so I consider them to be the primary authors and if anyone wants to list the episode writer they can be listed as author2 if necessary. Little is gained from repeating this data, everything is gained by specifying the speaker. 184.145.18.50 (talk) 20:09, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * You have not persuaded me. Citations like this from Wallykazam! are not proper uses of
 * Do not misuse cs1|2 templates in this way. If you want to quote a character from an episode, do so, but these templates are not the proper tools for that task.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 22:54, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 22:54, 26 February 2016 (UTC)


 * This basically means we can't use the quote= field if we want to attribute a character. We'd just manually put Bobgoblin: "Bobgoblin!" or something. How about a "speaker=" field? First/Last should be taken out and instead have author-first/author-last and speaker-first/speaker-last. It's just very convenient to use first/last to indicate the speaker.


 * The problem with citing writers is we don't know how specific dialogue actually is to writers. Sometimes when writers work on a show, they don't write the dialogue completely in stone and some ad-libbing occurs on part of the actors. A good example of this is Monday Night Raw. There are certainly script writers in the WWE but they only write the overall plot, they don't actually write every distinct word of the dialogue, which is why if I was quoting from an episode of Raw, the first/last would be attributed to the IRL person, not the WWE writers, particularly since there's a whole bunch of writers and I don't know their names or who was involved in what storylines.


 * Crediting the voice actors would be more specific, since they are the authors of their own speech, however a writer/director may have dictated it to them. I still think a "role=" field to supplement a "speaker=" field would be good though, since sometimes a voice actor will speak multiple roles in a show and you need to clarify which role did the quote.


 * Another issue is that sometimes, end credits do not directly associate voice actors with characters, some just give a big unspecified list of voice talent and people will not know which actor to attribute. For that reason a "role=" or "character=" would be useful. It's also useful if someone doesn't know who wrote an episode, since that info isn't always apparent or accessible if quoting from a clip where credits are not viewable. 184.145.18.50 (talk) 02:40, 6 March 2016 (UTC)


 * First, please use colons to indent your replies under others' replies to improve readability. Look at the post you are posting beneath and use one more colon they they did to indent your response under theirs.
 * Second, I think you may misconstrue what citations are for. They are not to include footnoted information in the article, but to provide a pointer to a source that supports statements made in the article.
 * The quote parameter is a way to provide a specific piece of information that supports a statement in the article, narrowing the search for the reader for the actual information in the source that is supporting that statement. It's a further refinement of locating the specific information in the source that is relevant to the particular information in the article. Just as page numbers are provided for books, thus preventing the reader from having to read an entire volume, quotes narrow that down even further.
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  16:42, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Date ranges
It often happens that a multi-volume work, or one published in parts (sometimes a few sheets at a time) has a date which needs to be expressed as a range, like 1844-1875, rather than a single year. The "Cite book" template currently returns a red warning if a range is entered in the date= or the year= field. A range of this kind is not the same thing as "origyear", and putting the range in origyear= without a date= results in the display of no date at all, hardly helpful. Could we please be permitted to have a date range in date= or at least year= to express the true situation for publications of this kind. With many thanks, Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:40, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Does the help text linked by the error message not answer this question?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:47, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It did, I had read a lot of irrelevant "help" text and tried several combinations. I do think that a plain hyphen or dash should work, as should a spaced en-dash; a bot can convert these if need be but frankly I don't see why anyone would care. Among the problems for the en-dash is that the citation tool doesn't provide for it, so one has to enter a hyphen in the tool, press ok and then tweak the text. It's also not a good choice for people entering the cite book code manually, a hyphen would be far more convenient. But we have to keep the wiki-gnomes busy. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:04, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
 * We follow MOS, which specifies an unspaced en dash for year ranges. If you want WP to be more flexible, start a conversation at the appropriate MOS talk page. Be prepared for a lively discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:53, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
 * En dashes can be entered at cursor position in any edit window (right next to the "Insert" drop down menu at the bottom of the edit window). My personal preference is to use en dash since it also visually signifies to other editors the use of an en dash, and hints the link to the template page, where more info is available. Additionally, it does not mess the metadata. I agree that MOS should be followed (as is already generally the case, imo) when it doesn't conflict with the objectives/purposes of the citation system. 72.43.99.130 (talk) 18:55, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
 * We follow MOS, which specifies an unspaced en dash for year ranges. If you want WP to be more flexible, start a conversation at the appropriate MOS talk page. Be prepared for a lively discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:53, 29 February 2016 (UTC)
 * En dashes can be entered at cursor position in any edit window (right next to the "Insert" drop down menu at the bottom of the edit window). My personal preference is to use en dash since it also visually signifies to other editors the use of an en dash, and hints the link to the template page, where more info is available. Additionally, it does not mess the metadata. I agree that MOS should be followed (as is already generally the case, imo) when it doesn't conflict with the objectives/purposes of the citation system. 72.43.99.130 (talk) 18:55, 29 February 2016 (UTC)


 * No, the error message does NOT answer the question for date ranges like "September/October 2006" or "September-October 2006". These are legitimate dates (some publications are bi-monthly), but the idiot code simply does not allow this. So one throws away half of the month information, and too bad if that happens to be the half that some catalog used. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:24, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Maybe the discussion above was unclear. There is no need to discard part of the date. The Help text that is linked from the error message explains this error in the first two lines of the helpful table: Issue: Hyphen (use dash), and Slash (use dash).


 * Here are two citations for the same publication, one with a hyphen between the month names (not valid, per MOS:DATERANGE), and one with an unspaced en dash, per MOS (valid):






 * And here's one with an en dash in the year range, to answer the original question in this thread:




 * Does that clarify things? – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:59, 9 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Yes. The problem is that the error message cites date values, not the separator, and the help verbiage and table of examples give (gave) no indication that month ranges are acceptable. Okay, I have added an entry to the table showing use of a date range; I hope there will be no objection to that. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 04:16, 10 March 2016 (UTC)


 * P.S. Since (per MOS) hyphens are pretty much verboten in dates, and most keyboards do not have en-dashes, instead of whining about hyphens why don't we have the code just fix them? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 04:22, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

|language= and ISO 639-2 codes
Module:Citation/CS1 queries MediaWiki to see if the value assigned to language is a supported (and thus valid) language. language allows language names and two-character ISO 639-1 codes (English, en). When these kinds of names or codes are recognized by MediaWiki the module adds the page to the appropriate category in.

I have tweaked Module:Citation/CS1/sandbox to accept MediaWiki-recognized three-character language codes and associated names. Because there are some 500 ISO 639-2 languages but comparatively few uses, I have elected to create a single category,, where the member pages are sorted by language code. That sorting is probably not optimal but for the time being should serve until we better understand the categorization needs.

This change does not address the issues raised in the previous discussion about languages and codes not supported by MediaWiki.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:08, 28 February 2016 (UTC)
 * As an FYI, Wikidata has properties for ISO codes (see search). Maybe you can use this some way? --Izno (talk) 17:35, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

internationalized domain names
This template uses Cyrillic characters in its domain name:

Module:Citation/CS1 does not understand, and probably never will understand, domain names that use non-Latin script. I have tweaked the sandbox to understand internationalized domain names so we can rewrite url to be:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:51, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
 * That feels really hacky though I'm not sure if there's a better way to deal with it. --Izno (talk) 13:22, 11 March 2016 (UTC)


 * This is the English Wikipedia, and editors who only speak English are constantly called upon to edit articles with foreign language phrases or which use foreign language websites in citations. Please show us a draft of how you will explain this hack to editors who only speak English, and are therefore unfamiliar with internationalized domain names (like me). If the hack can't be explained to a typical editor in the documentation, the hack should not be made, and those citations to domain names with non-Latin scripts should be hand-composed rather than using citation templates. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:35, 11 March 2016 (UTC)


 * If you believe that internationalized urls are a hack then perhaps you should take that up with the authors of RFC 3490 and of RFC 5890. It is true that domain names in non-Latin scripts exist.  It is true that there is a method for converting these to Latin script.  It is true that for English-only readers, both the non-Latin and internationalized domain names are unintelligible. It is true that both forms can be expected in current and future cs1|2 templates.  Because it is simple to do, Module:Citation/CS1/sandbox now supports internationalized domain names.  Tools for converting non-Latin domain names to the internationalized form exist, here are two:
 * http://mct.verisign-grs.com/
 * http://idna-converter.com/
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:00, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Not catching some ISBN errors
Examples: Bgwhite (talk) 08:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * 1) Achham District  87-7803-210-9 (bad)  87-7903-210-9 (good)
 * 2) Adamah 0-06-250992-5 (bad) 0-06-250922-5 (good)
 * 3) Company H, 6th Florida Infantry Regiment  9997970322 (bad)  Too old to have an ISBN.
 * 4) Collaborators Act 1972 9843003222 (bad)  since fixed with OCLC number.
 * 5) Tim Aaron 9998896924 (bad)
 * 6) Tom De Haven  6302800951, 6302800978, 6302801125, 6302801001 (bad)
 * 7) Gabriel's Oboe 6305614350 (bad) Not a book.


 * We wouldn't expect a template to detect whether an ISBN actually refers to a real book, only whether it is in one of the correct formats for an ISBN, right? Jc3s5h (talk) 10:15, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Agreed. And some of these problems look like they may be an edition was cited which is not the original publication. --Izno (talk) 12:41, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * For these three, the errors are caught but masked:
 * Achham District 87-7803-210-9 (bad) – cite has true
 * Adamah 0-06-250992-5 (bad) – cite has true
 * Collaborators Act 1972 9843003222 (bad) – cite has true
 * these are asin numbers masquerading as isbns:
 * Company H, 6th Florida Infantry Regiment 9997970322 (bad) – length and check-digit tests pass so the 'number' is correct
 * – can be found at Amazon through Special:BookSources/9997970322
 * Tim Aaron 9998896924 (bad) – length and check-digit tests pass so the 'number' is correct
 * – can be found at Amazon through Special:BookSources/9998896924
 * Tom De Haven 6302800951, 6302800978, 6302801125, 6302801001 (bad) – length and check-digit tests pass so the 'numbers' are correct
 * though mathematically correct as isbns, none are found at WorldCat nor can these be found at Amazon through Special:BookSources
 * Gabriel's Oboe 6305614350 (bad) – length and check-digit tests pass so the 'number' is correct
 * – works as isbn; found at WorldCat; cannot be found at Amazon through Special:BookSources
 * – works as asin
 * I don't know if these asin numbers that pass the length and check-digit tests are not legitimate isbns. Is there a way to know if these numbers are legitimate isbns?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:44, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * An ISBN that cannot be found does not necessarily imply a wrong identifier. It may be that the owner of the number has not registered it with R.R. Bowker's Books in Print database which is the official ISBN record holder worldwide. Or the ISBN may not be worldwide-barcode-compatible (the owner has to initiate this). Also note that when ISBNs are transferred (e.g. publishing co. gets sold/merged etc.), things can get complicated. Publication history can also complicate things, since different editions must have different ISBNs, which means somebody (at the publisher) has to be on top of things. This could also be useful: http://isbn.org/sites/default/files/images/isbn_agency_e-books_position_paper.pdf. 65.88.88.75 (talk) 20:07, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Gabriel's Oboe 6305614350 (bad) – length and check-digit tests pass so the 'number' is correct
 * – works as isbn; found at WorldCat; cannot be found at Amazon through Special:BookSources
 * – works as asin
 * I don't know if these asin numbers that pass the length and check-digit tests are not legitimate isbns. Is there a way to know if these numbers are legitimate isbns?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:44, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * An ISBN that cannot be found does not necessarily imply a wrong identifier. It may be that the owner of the number has not registered it with R.R. Bowker's Books in Print database which is the official ISBN record holder worldwide. Or the ISBN may not be worldwide-barcode-compatible (the owner has to initiate this). Also note that when ISBNs are transferred (e.g. publishing co. gets sold/merged etc.), things can get complicated. Publication history can also complicate things, since different editions must have different ISBNs, which means somebody (at the publisher) has to be on top of things. This could also be useful: http://isbn.org/sites/default/files/images/isbn_agency_e-books_position_paper.pdf. 65.88.88.75 (talk) 20:07, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * – works as asin
 * I don't know if these asin numbers that pass the length and check-digit tests are not legitimate isbns. Is there a way to know if these numbers are legitimate isbns?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:44, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * An ISBN that cannot be found does not necessarily imply a wrong identifier. It may be that the owner of the number has not registered it with R.R. Bowker's Books in Print database which is the official ISBN record holder worldwide. Or the ISBN may not be worldwide-barcode-compatible (the owner has to initiate this). Also note that when ISBNs are transferred (e.g. publishing co. gets sold/merged etc.), things can get complicated. Publication history can also complicate things, since different editions must have different ISBNs, which means somebody (at the publisher) has to be on top of things. This could also be useful: http://isbn.org/sites/default/files/images/isbn_agency_e-books_position_paper.pdf. 65.88.88.75 (talk) 20:07, 9 March 2016 (UTC)


 * This page has useful info, and can also generate a file with the ranges of valid ISBNs by language/country. Note that changes in assignations are frequent. According to the source page, "Data from this file can also be used to detect ISBNs that are invalid because a particular Registration Group Element within an EAN.UCC Prefix or a specific Registrant Element Range within a Registration Group has yet to be defined." However, this looks cumbersome imo.
 * EDIT: A quick tool for 10-digit checking ISBNs is the ISBN Converter, here. It should catch most bad numbers.72.43.99.130 (talk) 20:30, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I've added that link to Help:CS1 errors.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:01, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Requesting maintenance category for ignored ISBN errors
I am finding uses of true, like this one, that are invalid. Can we please have a tracking category that simply tracks usage of this parameter? There should not be any message displayed in the article, just a hidden category. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:46, 12 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Like this? Needs a better category name I think.  When isbn is invalid and ignore-isbn-error is set:
 * and when ignore-isbn-error not set:
 * and when isbn is valid:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, like that, but with no maintenance message. Some ISBNs are validly ignored – I cleaned out most of the 8,000 articles in the error category, and I found only a small handful (maybe ten?) for which I thought the "ignore" message was valid. I don't remember why at this point, but I think I put in HTML comments. In the last few days, however, I have found multiple "ignore" parameters that were placed in citations with ISBNs that were invalid and easily fixed.
 * and when isbn is valid:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, like that, but with no maintenance message. Some ISBNs are validly ignored – I cleaned out most of the 8,000 articles in the error category, and I found only a small handful (maybe ten?) for which I thought the "ignore" message was valid. I don't remember why at this point, but I think I put in HTML comments. In the last few days, however, I have found multiple "ignore" parameters that were placed in citations with ISBNs that were invalid and easily fixed.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, like that, but with no maintenance message. Some ISBNs are validly ignored – I cleaned out most of the 8,000 articles in the error category, and I found only a small handful (maybe ten?) for which I thought the "ignore" message was valid. I don't remember why at this point, but I think I put in HTML comments. In the last few days, however, I have found multiple "ignore" parameters that were placed in citations with ISBNs that were invalid and easily fixed.
 * Yes, like that, but with no maintenance message. Some ISBNs are validly ignored – I cleaned out most of the 8,000 articles in the error category, and I found only a small handful (maybe ten?) for which I thought the "ignore" message was valid. I don't remember why at this point, but I think I put in HTML comments. In the last few days, however, I have found multiple "ignore" parameters that were placed in citations with ISBNs that were invalid and easily fixed.


 * Editors looking at articles in the category can search the wikitext for "ignore" to find the citation in question, so a maintenance message is not needed, I think. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:44, 12 March 2016 (UTC)


 * I've added another test that adds the category when the ISBN is valid but the template includes ignore-isbn-error:
 * Also modified the error message so that it says why the ISBN test failed:
 * Also modified the error message so that it says why the ISBN test failed:
 * Also modified the error message so that it says why the ISBN test failed:


 * I'm not sure that we should have different visibility for different maintenance categories. Maintenance cat messages are already hidden from the general readership so hiding  them even more doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:16, 12 March 2016 (UTC)


 * And a couple more:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:41, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:41, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:41, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:41, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:41, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

stripmarkers
Someone has changed the definition of a stripmarker. Prior to yesterday, stripmarkers looked sort of like this:

where:
 * is the delete character
 * is,  ,  ,  , or
 * is a unique identifier for this particular stripmarker

Yesterday, the form changed to:

That change disrupted the invisible characters check and the rendering of  content in a cs1|2 template's metadata.

I have tweaked the sandbox to accommodate this change.

There is a related conversation at WP:VPT

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:45, 11 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Hopefully the fix will be implemented soon. Followed the discussion at Village Pump. It is interesting (not in a good way) that a change with notable repercussions downstream is not better communicated by its author(s). 64.134.68.211 (talk) 13:14, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * The change may have been unintentional. There are a number of bugs listed at T28213 which is the tracking bug for all strip marker changes. --Izno (talk) 15:54, 12 March 2016 (UTC)
 * All the more so to be careful whenever any changes are contemplated. Especially since from our vantage point, these changes seem to be happening in a vacuum. 72.43.99.138 (talk) 13:20, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Turns out to have been deliberate. Woops. --Izno (talk) 11:34, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

I have spent some time this morning revising the code that must deal with stripmarkers. Stripmarkers are detected with Lua patterns. I've created a central repository of those patterns in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration/sandbox. Having them live in a single location will make it easier should MediaWiki change their form again. I have also taken a cue from Editor Johnuniq, the primary author of the convert module, and made the stripmarker patterns more accepting of variations; the new patterns will work with the current form as well as with the form in use prior to 10 March 2016.

On 20 January 2016, the templates and  were changed from strings of mostly invisible unicode characters to css markup. The module looked for the specific patterns of characters that were the older forms of the templates so that they were not flagged as errors by the invisible character tests. Because the templates have been updated, I have removed those tests. Similarly, the function  in Module:Citation/CS1/sandbox has been tweaked to remove the bypass code that knew to ignore  and.

I have changed Module:Citation/CS1/COinS/sandbox to use the  stripmarkers defined in /Configuration/sandbox. I have removed the definitions of and  that the function   used to replace those templates with simple apostrophe and apostrophe-s. The function now looks for the css markup that is produced by those templates.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:48, 14 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, good work. I use these templates, especially because end-user screens are prone to be 10" and smaller these days, and readability may thus be a more prominent issue. And hopefully, pending changes in mw will be better advertised/tested in the future. 72.43.99.130 (talk) 20:39, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

todo: cleanup
Occasionally I drop myself a note by leaving a comment in the code prefaced with TODO:. One of those wondered why the variable  is in the call to function   because that variable isn't used in that function. Apparently I added it in the early days of url and wikilink detection in the various -link parameters. Since it serves no purpose, I have removed it from the function and the four function calls – one each for authors, editors, contributors, and translators. Because all are the same, only authors is demonstrated here. Both live and sandbox should show the same error message:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:27, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Another TODO: involves lists of date parameters. The code creates a list of date parameters in the function call to. Then, it creates a separate list before calling. I've retained but moved the separate list and pass the list name to both  and. Both live and sandbox should show the same error message:

and both live and sandbox dates should convert to dmy format:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:00, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

archive-url handling when both url and chapter-url are present
This TODO: wonders about the link swapping that occurs when all of url, chapter-url, and archive-url are set. At present, archive-url is applied to the value in title and the archived message gets its link from url. Is that how it should be, or should the swap be between chapter-url and archive-url? In this compare, live shows the url/archive-url swap, sandbox shows the chapter-url/archive-url swap:

The change does not change archive-url handling when only one of url or chapter-url is set. Shall this change be retained?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:07, 16 March 2016 (UTC)


 * The cited source is the chapter. Assuming the template has been filled correctly, archive-url should point to an archive of the source (ie the chapter), therefore the swap should be between chapter-url and archive-url. The archive should not be pointing to the source's enclosing work. 65.88.88.200 (talk) 13:49, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Alternately, why not have archive options for both? Building on 65's point above, if we had a archive-chapter-url along with archive-url, we could link the chapter title to the archive of the chapter and link the title to the archive of the enclosing work. As for the "Archived from..." text, I don't see a point in linking out the original title's link if the original chapter link is there. Or maybe we link both somehow if it's not confusing.  Imzadi 1979  →   14:31, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

|embargo= date validation
A comment at Help talk:Citation Style 1 inspired me to look at how the module handles embargo. It occurred to me that any MOS valid date format is accepted but not necessarily handled correctly. For example setting embargo to a range of dates in the future doesn't do what is expected:

So, I tightened-up the date validation for embargo so that it accepts dmy, mdy, and ymd format dates: but this is not accepted:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:53, 16 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Embargo date should also be suppressed if it is expired. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:07, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * The embargo date is never displayed. When the embargo does expire, the module adds the page to  so that editors can know to remove embargo.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:21, 16 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Seems displayed to me in the above examples Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:07, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * May do, but those dates aren't part of the cs1 templates; they are added outside so that you can see why the templates are rendered as they are: title linked or not linked; with and without category messages.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 18:17, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see it now. I was wondering what was up with the strange range for dates in the code, but I was just parsing it wrong in my head. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 18:26, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Maintenance category to check for "=" in parameters?
Many citation errors are caused by a missing pipe (vertical bar), causing the citation template to be missing a title or an author parameter, for example. Some of those errors, like this one, are caught by our existing checks, but others, like this one, are not. I wonder if it would be useful to have a maintenance category that looked for the "=" character in parameters that are highly unlikely to contain one.

I can imagine title-holding parameters having "=" characters inside them, but location and pages, for example, should probably not have such characters. We would not need to check parameters that are already checked for errors that would catch a stray "=", such as ISBN, DOI, and date. Thoughts? – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:48, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I have just fixed a couple dozen of these. Mostly due to missing pipes, I'm finding "=" characters in quote, pages, publisher, and other parameters. I am finding these via WikiProject Check Wikipedia/ISBN errors, but extrapolating from that list, I expect that there are hundreds of instances of parameters that are unintentionally being rendered as part of other parameters. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:04, 15 March 2016 (UTC)


 * I've hacked the sandbox and added a test that looks for parameter values that match one of two patterns:
 * – required white space, letters and digits, optional white space, required '='
 * – letters and digits at the start of the parameter value, optional white space, required '='
 * If either of these are found, the string of letters and digits is compared against the list of valid parameter names. If there is a match, the a maintenance category is added.  For this hack I'm using the extra text maintenance category until a more appropriate name is chosen.


 * Each parameter value is inspected:
 * – pattern 1
 * – pattern 2
 * – pattern 2
 * – no match
 * – pattern 1
 * – no match
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:23, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
 * – pattern 1
 * – no match
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:23, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
 * – no match
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:23, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:23, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I've changed the category to because this abomination of a citation wasn't making sense with the extra text cat:

Because that citation shows the 'delete character' error message, I changed it to use the sandbox but that produces this:

Templates within a cs1|2 template are processed before the cs1|2 template. So, the module sees this:

The missing pipe detector is finding the  attribute in the  tag. So, the current detector is destined for failure and the rubbish tip unless a way can be found around this issue.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:05, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

That turned out to be a simple change: remove xml/html tags from the parameter value, then look for missing pipes.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:51, 17 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Ugh. Thanks for debugging this one. This is why I suggested a maintenance category instead of a red error message. There will be all sorts of false positives at first. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:59, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Transcript parameter for cite podcast
This question (Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 5) was asked in March 2014 and after becoming frustrated in my attempts to solve it, I left Wikipedia editing for quite some time. Will the question ever be addressed by people who know the Lua coding and can avoid all the mistakes I made in trying to solve it? It still seems a valid parameter to have for the Cite podcast template.&mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  12:37, 23 February 2016 (UTC)


 * As a follow-up, is this just not going to happen?
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  18:51, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Retrieved date precedes archived date
At Tennessee Walking Horse in cases where I archived dead URLs (using the archive-url= and archive-date= parameters), the Retrieved date precedes the Archived date. Some indicate they were Retrieved over a year before they were Archived. How and why is that? Also, I retrieved the Archived versions today. Isn't that an important retrieval parameter? Cheers! 07:36, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Unless you have savvy editors who check for archived versions of sites when they access them, it's quite often the case that the site is archived long after it was accessed by the editor. In those cases, the url of the first available archived site is the one to use, as the intention is to have an archived version of the site that matches what the editor saw when s/he used it as a source. An editor always has the opportunity to either archive the site for the first time when they visit it or add an archive that is dated on the date they access the site. Sadly, it isn't common for that to happen. As for the retrieval date for the archive, that is unimportant compared to the date the site was archived. The archived date identifies which archived version was retrieved. When you retrieved that version is irrelevant, as it doesn't help identify which version is referenced.
 * In glancing at your edits, I would highly recommend always including dead-url for ease in future editing. If omitted, it's understood to be "no" (meaning the original url is still live); if the original goes offline, it's easier to revise the "no" to "yes" than it is to add the parameter and value. Per Trappist below, I stand corrected. Sorry! All the more reason to include the dead-url and set it to.
 * Additionally, for one of the citations you marked as dead (footnote 12), I searched Google for the title and found another url where the article had been cross-posted. I updated the url, archived the page, and added the archive parameters. I also added a parenthetical note indicating the cross-posting in the publisher parameter. For additional methods to rescue dead links, have a look at WP:DEADLINK
 * For notes about issues with the web archive, it's probably best to enclose them in  comment brackets so they're visible to editors but not readers. I didn't fix this, and honestly don't know if it's your edit. I just happened to notice it and didn't do more research.
 * Thanks for your efforts to stem Link rot, which are greatly appreciated by a bunch of us! Cheers, yourself!
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  08:20, 25 February 2016 (UTC)


 * If omitted, it's understood to be "no" (meaning the original url is still live).


 * The default state of dead-url is  which means that when dead-url is omitted or empty, the url in url is dead so title is linked to the url provided in archive-url:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:55, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:55, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:55, 25 February 2016 (UTC)


 * My apologies and thanks. I knew that; it was late and I was very tired! Thanks, Trappist!
 * &mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk


 * Since the process can be automated perhaps one of the bot maintainers should add a task to deliberately trigger archivation of a (new) snapshot at archive.org whenever a new link gets added to an article. While this should be triggered immediately if the link was added by editors with more than perhaps 1000 edits, archivation of links added by new editors or IPs would be triggered only, if they survived in the article for more than a week. Something like this would help a lot in keeping information accessible long-term and help improving the quality of articles while keeping potential abuse at a minimum.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:44, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

, that's an excellent idea. I only hope some of the bot operators see it and at least comment on its feasibility? ? Any thoughts? What other bots deal with citations that might incorporate an automated archive feature? &mdash; D'Ranged 1 &#124;  VTalk  :  19:01, 17 March 2016 (UTC)