Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 79

illustrator
Propose adding  to   and others:


 * .... 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 19:02, 2 September 2021 (UTC)


 * There is also similar topic above. Personally, I cannot conceive of any situation where the express addition of a book illustrator would help verify a book's content. It is highly unlikely that illustrators of books are indexed in reference databases, and therefore very hard to find the source (or help find the source) by that particular information. In contrast, relating to the "narrator" discussion linked previously, I have seen several trade databases that index the "narrator" field, as this is considered an important role in audiobooks. 65.88.88.76 (talk) 20:41, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Just adding that my above opinion is limited to . 65.88.88.76 (talk) 20:44, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I wondered about this too. I would think that there are many cases where the illustrator is notable and it would be nice to have a wikilink to them. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 05:51, 5 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The situation is uncommon enough that others may be used, as in illus. Quentin Blake. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 08:16, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Zotero not reading COinS
I have noticed several times recently that Zotero (in Firefox) is not detecting the COinS metadata emitted by our citation templates; for example on List of London medical students who assisted at Belsen.

I see the same problem when I am not logged in, so I don't think it has anything to do with my gadgets or user scripts.

Are there any known issues with our COinS?

One possible cause (related to JavaScript, so possibly not relevant), is described on "Connector intermittently does not recognize COinS", on the Zotero forums. It also suggests a fix, but not one we can apply in templates.

Can anyone suggest another cause, or fix? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:49, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * How recently is recently? The last cs1|2 module-suite update was 10 April 2021.  Are you the only editor who is experiencing this problem with our citations?  Do you have a problem getting the metadata from  citations?  That template does not use the cs1|2 module suite to emit metadata.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:10, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * In the last couple of weeks, though it is not something I do every week. I have not examined other editors' systems. Zotero found COinS on Template:Cite patent/testcases on first attempt. On re-examining "List of London medical students...", the issue seems intermittent, and not predictably reproducable. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:20, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Haven't seen this yet.
 * When you run into this again, can you check the source code of the loaded web page if it actually contains the COinS data (and perhaps post an example here)?
 * Just a wild guess, but perhaps there is some instance removing the COinS span for being an empty span? In the current implementation they can be found immediately following the closing :
 * Also worth trying is to check if this also happens with JavaScript disabled.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:32, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:32, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Accept-this-as-written markup doesn't work on individual items with commas
The Accept-this-as-written markup section says Markup can be applied to the entry as a whole or to individual list entries, but that doesn't seem to work for numbers with commas, e.g.  returns. This could be solved by adding the following to the top of : After that line replaces commas and semicolons with their full-width equivalents, do the split, and then return at the end of the function. I've mocked it up in the sandbox here. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE ) 17:30, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

PAGE ]]) 20:36, 3 September 2021 (UTC) PAGE ]]) 05:06, 4 September 2021 (UTC) PAGE ]]) 18:12, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
 * returns  &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:47, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * @Headbomb Yes, but the documentation says that it can be applied to individual list entries as well, and doesn't need to be applied to the entire entry. The sandbox version with my changes, e.g., does return   --Ahecht ([[User talk:Ahecht|TALK
 * I'm sure your contribution is appreciated, but isn't it easier to correct the documentation so that is in sync with the current production code? Also, the editor documentation follows module coding in that it focusses on field-level operations, including field-list separators. I think that this is a good design/coding decision presently. The formatting of individual field-list entries (such as the issue of notation in this discussion) can be handled by the special markup as pointed out. The complexity of the imo already tottering editor documentation will be increased in applying your otherwise good solution. Not a good thing, I think. 65.88.88.126 (talk) 21:43, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It is important that the syntax works globally as well as for individual entries in the list, but there are several subtleties, so we need to be careful. As an example, the code in the sandbox reintroduces a bug trashing the data when only the outer list elements have the syntax, but not those in between, see:
 * Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_73
 * See also:
 * Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 78
 * Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 78
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:19, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
 * @Matthiaspaul Good point, that's a test case I hadn't evaluated. The sandbox version is fixed now, and all the examples in that Archive 73 section evaluate identically for the normal and sandbox version. --Ahecht ([[User talk:Ahecht|TALK
 * At some point, this constant "fixing" of minutiae and special cases will have to either give way to rational redesign and the more pressing issues or it will collapse under its own complexity. This particular issue is unnecessary, and avoidable. There are already 2 ways to handle this: apply the markup to the entire field, or avoid the thousands notation. I would love to see how the documentation will explain the proposed changes so that it makes sense. In-source fields already have complicated documentation, now the entire scope of the module changes to handle a case that appears in probably <0.001 of all citations. The current scope is adequate: the editor is given instruction on the field (argument) level, which includes list separators. The formatting of individual list entries is a whole other level. It would be far simpler to document this at the module level and tell editors that these templates do not use thousands notation, and that doing so may result in display problems. 104.247.55.106 (talk) 14:13, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
 * No change to the documentation is needed whatsoever if my change is implemented. This simplifies the documentation, because you can simply keep the current documentation that states that the "Accept-this-as-is" syntax works on individual list items or the entire string. The alternative is to change the documentation to state that you can sometimes use the accept-this-as-is notation on individual list items, but not always. --Ahecht ([[User talk:Ahecht|TALK
 * Is the novelty of editors having to apply markup to parts of parameter values (as yet one more option that applies to a miniscule number cases) a simplification? It doesn't seem so. But not to belabor the issue. This is just my opinion. 24.103.101.218 (talk) 23:27, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
 * This change introduces substantial complexity to the code, which is already not lacking in obscurity. A further concern is the additional runtime. Though small, it will be additional for everyone, just to support an exceptional case. And why do we want to support commas (or semicolons) in page numbers anyway? I would rather simplify both code and documentation by saying it only works on the entire string. Kanguole 09:14, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Add languages
Hi,

How can I add ajp (South Levantine) and apc (North Levantine) to the list of supported ISO 639-2 three-character codes?

Other Arabic varieties are already supported: aeb (Tunisian), arq (Algerian), ars (Najdi), ary (Moroccan), arz (Egyptian), shu (Chadian); so I think Levantine varieties (South and North) should be as well as they are among the most spoken and most widely understood in the Arab world. A455bcd9 (talk) 08:18, 7 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi ,
 * Just saw your edit on Levantine Arabic. You wrote that there was no solution. Is it really the case? How come other Arabic varieties are supported but not ajp and apc? Couldn't we follow the same process that led to their inclusion in the list of supported codes?
 * Thanks for any help you can provide :) A455bcd9 (talk) 08:45, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
 * That is precisely the reason. MediaWiki doesn't recognize   and  :
 * but:
 * but:
 * but:


 * You can write:
 * South Levantine Arabic
 * North Levantine Arabic
 * The language still won't be recognized but at least the rendered citation won't be quite so cryptic:
 * You can suggest that MediaWiki support  and   by filing a ticket at Phabricator.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:48, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks.
 * Actually I did open a ticket in July 2021: here and I thought the issue was solved (in particular by this commit).
 * So apparently this is yet another issue. A ticket was opened in 2018 (and updated in June 2021) regarding Wikidata entries here. It's maybe related? So I opened a new ticket there. A455bcd9 (talk) 12:17, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:48, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks.
 * Actually I did open a ticket in July 2021: here and I thought the issue was solved (in particular by this commit).
 * So apparently this is yet another issue. A ticket was opened in 2018 (and updated in June 2021) regarding Wikidata entries here. It's maybe related? So I opened a new ticket there. A455bcd9 (talk) 12:17, 9 September 2021 (UTC)


 * The full list of languages and codes recognized by Mediawiki is at Template:Citation_Style_documentation/language/doc. Many of the entries at Category:CS1_maint:_unrecognized_language are stuck there indefinitely because of language codes that are not recognized by Mediawiki.  All have hidden notes in their coding stating so; I have added some of those notes.
 * I will also try to add a ticket as you did, to have all of those unrecognized language tags added.
 * Ira Leviton (talk) 21:59, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks!
 * It would be really helpful because this issue is broader than just the citation templates: it apparently also affects Wikidata where entries in these languages cannot be added. A455bcd9 (talk) 07:41, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikidata additions require extra effort and should have their own task(s). Izno (talk) 13:20, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikidata additions require extra effort and should have their own task(s). Izno (talk) 13:20, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

language name/tag overrides, removal of
Another conversation reminded me that there have been changes to MediaWiki's language-name support.

It used to be that MediaWiki assigned 'Crimean Turkish' to language tag  but now:

cs1|2 got round that by overriding the tag  to 'Crimean Tatar'; that override is no longer necessary.

I have tweaked the language handling code some to better handle IETF-like language tags that are supported by MediaWiki. Doing that allows the removal of   and    from the override table.













Overrides not broken:



and non-overrides not broken:



and unrecognized language tags and names not broken:



—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:18, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

[Template:Cite book] no way to indicate what the original language and title?
Does Template:Cite book not have some parameters to add the original language and title of a work? Veverve (talk) 17:59, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * , You're supposed to use the actual title in the actual language in the cite - do not translate it to English. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:24, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The situation is: if I have a book which was translated into English (no by me, but by the book's translator), is there no place I can indicate the book's original language and title? Veverve (talk) 18:27, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * (ec) That applies if you are citing the original, non-translated work, in which case the original title goes in |title= and an Enlish translation can (if necessary) go in |trans-title= . If you are citing a translation of the work into English, which has an English language title, then the English-language title goes in the title field.Nigel Ish (talk) 18:31, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * That applies to published translations, if you cite the original non-English work you could provide a brief quote from the source as well as your translation of it, see Template:Cite book for the relevant parameters. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:42, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I am in the citing a translation of the work into English, which has an English language title case. So, in which parameter can I add the original language and the original, before translation title? Veverve (talk) 18:51, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * At a push it could go into |orig-date= field (i.e. smthing like |orig-date=First published 1934 as "Le Jardin de Les Flics", although I don't know whether this is pushing the field too much. The citation is meant to give enough information to allow the reader to find it and verify its contents.Nigel Ish (talk) 19:02, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * (edit-conflict) Since it wasn't mentioned explicitly already, if the cited book is not in English, the language should be specified in the language parameter.
 * This does not apply if you are citing from a published English translation of a book originally written in another language, of course. If it is useful to indicate that the book is a translation you could specify the translator using translator-last/translator-first. If the original language is important to know as well, you could add a comment following the citation, that is, between the closing }} of the template and the closing . I typically format them like "(NB. This is a translation of the original work titled "xyz" in French.)". In some cases, it might be even useful to mention the original foreign-language edition in either another citation like  , or bundled into the same   entry like
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:08, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Along with the translator parameters mentioned above, for translated-in-English books the free-form parameter orig-year could be used, e.g originally published [year] in [language] as [foreign title]. Optionally following the foreign title I often add the (foreign) location: publisher after a dot separator. I believe the foreign original may be easier to find with the addition of location and publisher, but I have no real proof-of-concept. 68.173.76.118 (talk) 01:37, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Publication-place and publisher are certainly useful as well (also for the translated work), but if all this information is known already, this makes up a citation in its own right rather than meant only as a hint. I think, moving it into a separate cite book (as suggested above) is more appropriate then, even if the ISBN or exact page number may not be known in the original edition. This way, proper metadata would not only be generated for the translation but also for the original work, and thereby it may become very easy to locate a copy of the original work.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 08:50, 12 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Adding one more unneeded citation will likely add clutter. I can see the usefulness to the verifying reader of the translator parameter (there may be different translators with same publisher). I can also see the usefulness of the original edition info such as orig-year which can help point to a work's 1st edition. This is a detail, and another long discussion, but the gist of it is, the 1st edition is in most cases considered the definitive edition (outside of editions that contain author-made revisions/corrections). There may be subtle differences between editions depending on the publisher/work editor. Comparing such differences is important in the hopefully very rare cases where a wikitext contributor may claim a fact based on the edition difference. Or goes edition-shopping to help establish a claim as fact. It is good to give the reader a hint in finding the original, but since the usefulness is very narrow, I cannot see adding a whole new citation for it. 65.88.88.57 (talk) 11:53, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

suppress display of "(report)" in cite report
The documentation for Cite report omits mention of option to suppress the display of not-helpful-IMO "(report)" in the reference created. Include "|type=none" to suppress that. I use this for National Register of Historic Places document refs. --Doncram (talk) 01:47, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * to Template:Cite report/doc. GoingBatty (talk) 02:20, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Suggestion for a change to a template
Please forgive me if this idea has has already been "considered" and rejected ... or something like that.

My suggestion was already entered in a place ("Teahouse") that was perhaps ill-advised (and any link to the "new" section is liable to itself become a "", once that new section gets "archived"). (right?)

However, a "DIFF" URL which serves as a link to an "edit" ... remains valid for a longer time ... as long as the old ["non-latest"] versions of the page (in this case, a 'Teahouse' page) that got edited, are still extant. Here is an example of such a "DIFF" URL:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Teahouse&diff=prev&oldid=1042098412

... and, even if ^H^H when that ['Teahouse' page] section does get "archived", there is probably some text inside the entries of that section, which is unique enough to be searched for, such that ... one could find the 'lost' ("archived") section, even after it has been "moved" to a different URL.

...In fact, I could even update the URL shown below! ... if I don't forget. In the mean time (at least until that that new section gets "archived"), my "suggestion" can be seen here:


 * Teahouse

So ... there is no necessity for the suggestion to be "repeated" here. (right?)

--Mike Schwartz (talk) 06:39, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The url-access parameter takes four possible values: "[ ]", " ", " ", " ". The parameter url-status takes: " ", " ", " ", " " (and soon also " "). As far as I was able to understand you, you were trying to add paywall to a citation at Political family pointing to, but that was rejected by the citation template with an error message, so you switched to unfit instead, adding a HTML comment:
 * "not really [exactly] unfit; but access to the web page at the "url" [...] is subject to some possible inconvenience or other issue, due to a paywall ['if applicable']; ... while it is free for anyone [...] to access the web page at the "archive-url"".)
 * If this is really what you meant to do, then url-status is the wrong parameter to be used (or even live would be valid) and you should have instead added either registration or subscription depending on the type of "paywall" you see.
 * I'm not sure what you meant by "if applicable". If I have a look at the URL (and comparing with archive-url ), I can see what appears to be the whole article (free and without any kind of registration), so url-access would be inappropriate. Or is there a longer version of the article available after subscription? If so, then a combination of subscription and limited would be the way to go.
 * Are you seeing some other kind of access restriction? Do you think we are missing a state not already covered properly by the existing set of predefined values?
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 07:59, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Here's a link to the documentation. Also, when you have a question, it helps to give a concise statement of it, in plain English. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:40, 3 September 2021 (UTC)


 * THANK YOU to all who responded.
 * I was able to find this section -- (which is probably a permanent home for [all or ... "at least" some] discussion about this [a certain] "suggestion") -- by clicking on a direct link to it, that was provided by someone.
 * (However, in order to find that direct link, after my original "suggestion" section
 * [which had initially been placed at 'Teahouse', ... sorta clumsily perhaps]
 * had already been archived, I had to do a SEARCH, and ... being able to access the full text of the "diff" at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Teahouse&diff=prev&oldid=1042098412 was helpful to me, in terms of enabling me to "guess" some search terms that might lead me to THIS archived version: Teahouse/Questions/Archive_1122 ... which is where I was able to find a certain direct link [THANKS!] to this section of this ["Talk:"] page.)
 * I would like to (and I intend to ... if I don't forget) respond to some of the remaining questions, -- such as
 * "Are you seeing some other kind of access restriction?"
 * and
 * "Do you think we are missing a state not already covered properly by the existing set of predefined values?" --
 * and also to (probably) try to explain (if necessary) what I meant by using the phrase << "making the URL in the "archive-url" field primary" >>.
 * However I don't have enough time right now, so ... maybe later.
 * Thanks, --Mike Schwartz (talk) 17:32, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Dates were moved?
Maybe my memory is failing me, but has CS1 always output dates like this:
 * McClure, Tess (16 September 2021). "Aukus submarines banned from New Zealand as pact exposes divide with western allies". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 September 2021. (source)

I never remembered the dates being in parenthese like that. Is that new? &#8211; MJL &thinsp;‐Talk‐☖ 18:06, 16 September 2021 (UTC)


 * This has always how it's been unless you have none of the authorship parameters:, and this case has an outstanding request for change since half a decade ago that is non-trivial to implement. Izno (talk) 18:45, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Volume/Issue not compatible with many journals
I don't know how to describe many journals, especially non-English, which don't identify "volume", but are usually marked as issue/year and/or issue from beginning. "Issue" field displays at the end and des not accept any other text. Pibwl &larr;&laquo; 12:34, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Could you provide an example. 66.108.237.246 (talk) 12:38, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
 * You can omit volume. It is not required. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:24, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, after some research I know, that what I really meant is a magazine, not journal, with template:Cite magazine. And indeed, "issue" field works well here. However, it would have been much easier, if "issue" and "volume" fields were included in "Most commonly used parameters" section on template:Cite magazine page. Thanks. Pibwl &larr;&laquo; 15:09, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Go forth and edit the documentation. Izno (talk) 17:06, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

Place holder title "Subscribe to read..."
Some of the placeholder titles for websites that have content behind a paywall/subscription have their subscription advertisement (e.g. "Subscribe to read | Financial Times") as the placeholder title. Tanaya001 (talk) 13:04, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * At least this one says it was added with reFill 2. Kanguole 13:12, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Not really a cs1|2 issue because cs1|2 can only render what it is given. If editors choose to use that hopelessly broken, unmaintained tool and then don't cleanup after it leaves a mess, someone else will have to do the cleanup.  cs1|2 does aid in the cleanup by emitting an error message when it detects certain bogus article titles:
 * Beyond that, little can be done by cs1|2.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:38, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Beyond that, little can be done by cs1|2.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:38, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:38, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

hyphen_to_dash moved
Because of a conversation at, I have moved  from Module:Citation/CS1/sandbox to Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities/sandbox. The move allows Module:Footnotes/sandbox to have access to all of the necessary functionality without unnecessary code duplication.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:12, 16 September 2021 (UTC)
 * . It is not a good idea to be adding stuff to the cs1|2 module suite that is not used by cs1|2.  It is the responsibility of, , and  to use the output from   as-it-is, to modify that output as necessary to suit their needs, or do what needs doing on their own.  The cs1|2 module suite is not all things to all templates.  I am going to revert.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 18:55, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, then we must have misunderstood each other, because that's what I was talking about in regard to the functional differences between the implementations at Template_talk:Sfn. ;-)
 * Unfortunately, if we don't want that extra parameter in CS1 (since we don't need it in CS1), we can't merge the two functions because r and friends depend on this. But no problem, the current merge still had a bug anyway which I was in the process of fixing.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:18, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Perhaps, perhaps not. I was thinking that something like this in Module:String2 would do what you want:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:51, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:51, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

[Template:Cite book] hyperlink for second editor
Is there no way to add a WP hyperlink for a second editor at Template:Cite book? Veverve (talk) 05:44, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Of course there is. editor2-link. You should be splitting out your editors into separate parameters (editor2-last and editor2-first, or at least editor2) to make this work. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:55, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

Errata problem
Recent edits at Fea's tree rat and Common remora have produced "Lua error in Module:Cite_iucn at line 180: attempt to concatenate a nil value". That is seen by previewing the following.

Johnuniq (talk) 10:00, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Fixed.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:07, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * From Rock tapaculo,  gives "Lua error in Module:Cite_iucn at line 124: attempt to index field 'title' (a nil value)." Johnuniq (talk) 07:05, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Fixed.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:39, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Citation tool for Google Books - Server Error
http://reftag.appspot.com/ does not seem to be working? Chesdovi (talk) 13:41, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * See Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_78
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:23, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * This is not something we can help you with here. Moreover, this has been reported in the correct places onwiki (the tool creator's talk page). IznoPublic (talk) 14:30, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Requesting edit in Template:Cite journal
Please change Doi (identifier) to Digital object identifier to avoid redirect. Thanks. 2604:3D08:4E7F:F7E0:38AB:63B4:498:69DB (talk) 18:12, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * No, this is deliberately coded this way to avoid the clutter at "What links here" (read: make it useable again) and improve reverse lookup/filter capabilities in general.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 18:41, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

s2cid limit reached
Just a heads up that there are starting to be articles populating in Category:CS1 errors: S2CID that seem to be correct with values greater than 237000000. --Lightlowemon (talk) 13:55, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Just for the records, this was promptly set to 240000000 on 2021-08-31 by Trappist already.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:08, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Location parameter
Should the location parameter be used for the location of an archive? See and  for context. DrKay (talk) 17:40, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Option 1:
 * Option 2:
 * Option 3:
 * Option 4:

The location of the information, which is in paper form, is WINC Collection, 1616 THL, Stewart Bell Jr. Archives. That's the name of the collection, the room number, and the name of the archives department at the library itself. The library asks you, on their website, to "Cite As: WINC Collection, 1616 THL, Stewart Bell Jr. Archives, Handley Regional Library, Winchester, VA, USA." So, the publisher is, technically, Handley Regional Library. I am just required by them to cite it in such a way. I'm not being an asshole, I'm following their citation rules. If that puts the article in a clean up category, there's nothing I can do about that. That is the genuine location of the information. -  Neutralhomer •  Talk  • 17:53, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh, by the way, there is no "Page 1" within this collection. It's just a mass of all sorts of different things. -  Neutralhomer  •  Talk  • 17:54, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Perhaps is a better choice?  In cs1|2 ( etc) location is the physical location of the publisher.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 18:03, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * works just fine. Give me a couple minutes to move the references around. :) -  Neutralhomer  •  Talk  • 18:18, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Corrected. :) I think we can mark this as closed. -  Neutralhomer  •  Talk  • 18:34, 27 September 2021 (UTC)

metadata and accept-this-as-written markup
Discussion at caused me to notice that the accept-this-as-written markup is preserved when title is added to the metadata. I have fixed that:

I have not looked into the other places where accept-this-as-written markup may be used.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:18, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It's good that you mentioned this because I am sure I checked this in the past and your comment made me recheck it again now. Turns out, we have the same problem with doi, issn, eissn, pmid and volume.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:37, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * volume fixed:
 * Accept-as-written markup is documented for these identifiers: doi, eissn, isbn, issn, and sbn – the sbn value, even when valid, is not made part of the citation's metadata. For all other identifiers, invalid values are not made part of the citation's metadata even when wrapped with accept-as-written markup.  A simple fix ensures that all valid identifier values wrapped with accept-as-written markup, and invalid doi, eissn, isbn, and issn values that are wrapped with accept-as-written markup do not include the accept-as-written markup in the citation's metadata.  I have applied that fix:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:04, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Lua was now throwing a "Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities/sandbox at line 42: attempt to index local 'str' (a nil value)." for various template calls on Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_78.
 * This might have been caused by the changes above or other recent changes around the has_accept_as_written function. I have fixed this by catching the str == nil special case, but have not yet checked if a more general change on a higher level (that is, not to call the function with nil values in the first place) might be a better fix.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:14, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yep, tweaked a bit.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:01, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:04, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Lua was now throwing a "Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities/sandbox at line 42: attempt to index local 'str' (a nil value)." for various template calls on Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_78.
 * This might have been caused by the changes above or other recent changes around the has_accept_as_written function. I have fixed this by catching the str == nil special case, but have not yet checked if a more general change on a higher level (that is, not to call the function with nil values in the first place) might be a better fix.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:14, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yep, tweaked a bit.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:01, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:04, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Lua was now throwing a "Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities/sandbox at line 42: attempt to index local 'str' (a nil value)." for various template calls on Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_78.
 * This might have been caused by the changes above or other recent changes around the has_accept_as_written function. I have fixed this by catching the str == nil special case, but have not yet checked if a more general change on a higher level (that is, not to call the function with nil values in the first place) might be a better fix.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:14, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yep, tweaked a bit.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:01, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:04, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Lua was now throwing a "Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities/sandbox at line 42: attempt to index local 'str' (a nil value)." for various template calls on Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_78.
 * This might have been caused by the changes above or other recent changes around the has_accept_as_written function. I have fixed this by catching the str == nil special case, but have not yet checked if a more general change on a higher level (that is, not to call the function with nil values in the first place) might be a better fix.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:14, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yep, tweaked a bit.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:01, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Unlikely authors

 * Previous discussion: User talk:GreenC

I sometimes see online works attributed to prolific authors such as Mr. Privacy Statement, Ms. Cookie Policy and Dr. Submitted Content, which have clearly been scraped in a semi-automated way from the website. (Samples) Are they generated using some tool which could be improved? Certes (talk) 16:42, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I have added them to the list of bogus names:
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 18:54, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks! They usually seem to appear in first-last pairs as Privacy Statement – I'm not sure whether Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration is invoked when they're split that way.  Other regular contributors include:
 * "About Us"
 * "Contact Us"
 * "Content" (but beware of genuine author Thomas Content)
 * "Content Team"
 * "Home Page"
 * "Media"
 * "Privacy Policy"
 * "Site Admin"
 * "Site Name"
 * "Sponsored Content"
 * "Sponsors"
 * "Staff Directory"
 * "Staff Writer" (but more commonly something like "Daily Blurb Staff/Sports/Film/Obituary Writer", so possibly too complex)
 * Is it possible or desirable to look for individual words such as privacy, admin, content, etc. within longer names? Beware that we cite a few genuine authors with matching names, such as Cookie Lommel. Certes (talk) 19:40, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * "Staff writer" or "Admin" would be functional names, not bogus ones. It would be okay to state them in a citation if they are given this way in the publication. "Content Team" and "Sponsors" could be valid functional names as well, although unlikely. BTW, we have a similar list for bogus titles.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:59, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * So far we only sense(d) for individual words, but I have now added "Contact us", "About us", "Home page" and "Site name" as double-word patterns because I felt "Contact", "About", "Site", "Name", "Home", "Page" and "Us" could be (unusual) surnames in some languages as well. If we can rule this out, the patterns could be improved. We can also search for actual patterns.
 * This is a new feature, so we are still collecting patterns and as we find similarities between them this will likely see many detail refinements in the future. While it is possible to override the check using our ((accept-this-as-is)) syntax, we still must be careful to only generate a neglectible (that is, near zero) number of false positives. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:19, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks again. I discussed "Content Team", etc. with a couple of editors and found a weak consensus not to show them, but I see the advantage of erring on the side of caution by leaving them in. Certes (talk) 21:34, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If you'd like to give me some examples, I'll sic BattyBot 24 on them. Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 19:27, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I got rid of a few hundred cases with JWB but here are a few which I missed or are new:
 * Submitted Content: Lakewood Township, New Jersey; Mercer County Community College
 * About Us: Chip (rapper); Kalidas Rangalaya
 * I can trawl more carefully if you need more bot fodder. Certes (talk) 20:10, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * BattyBot has fixed these four, and is looking through the last database dump for more instances. Feel free to send more examples of frequently used patterns.  GoingBatty (talk) 21:37, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Well done! "About the Author" is a polymath, cited on a dozen topics ranging from LGBT rights in Ghana to Charlie's Burgers.  Less common ones include:
 * Privacy and Copyright Policy: Sharon Horne (psychologist); Silvia Sara Canetto
 * Syndicated Content: Jimmie Allen; Gg bb xx; Kane Brown
 * Most of the errors I fixed would be hard to delegate to a bot, often of the form Ivor Penn Chief Sports Writer, or a mishmash of non-persons such as ref 5 in Bioethics Bowl. Certes (talk) 23:34, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * ! GoingBatty (talk) 04:03, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Is there a category for those bogus names? Will you be adding a Help:CS1_errors section?  Thanks!  GoingBatty (talk) 04:03, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Sure, the category name will be Category:CS1 errors: generic name. I have added some provisional text now, but, as I wrote, this is a new feature, which will be fully activated with the next general template update.
 * See also:
 * Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_76
 * Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_77
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:40, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks to GoingBatty for the fixes and to Matthiaspaul for the links. I didn't realise this was a perennial request, but hope we've added a few more strings that can usefully be matched. Certes (talk) 13:41, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * author/first/last parameters with dates or years in them could be tagged as well. GoingBatty (talk) 14:16, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:25, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The current test would not find something like
 * If this is a reasonably common error, we could add a check if the name value is in one of our recognized date formats, and if it does, emit an error as well. April, May and June may need special cases. ;-) Well, probably not because as a date, they would not come without a year and/or day, so they would pass through correctly.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:44, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that the problem that results in "About Us", "Contact Us", "Home Page", "Privacy Policy" (and similar terms) being yielded is sometimes caused by the original URL no longer being available, and the website's servers are redirecting it to a generic landing page. For some websites this can happen for pages that require a subscription to view. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 15:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:25, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The current test would not find something like
 * If this is a reasonably common error, we could add a check if the name value is in one of our recognized date formats, and if it does, emit an error as well. April, May and June may need special cases. ;-) Well, probably not because as a date, they would not come without a year and/or day, so they would pass through correctly.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:44, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that the problem that results in "About Us", "Contact Us", "Home Page", "Privacy Policy" (and similar terms) being yielded is sometimes caused by the original URL no longer being available, and the website's servers are redirecting it to a generic landing page. For some websites this can happen for pages that require a subscription to view. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 15:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If this is a reasonably common error, we could add a check if the name value is in one of our recognized date formats, and if it does, emit an error as well. April, May and June may need special cases. ;-) Well, probably not because as a date, they would not come without a year and/or day, so they would pass through correctly.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:44, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that the problem that results in "About Us", "Contact Us", "Home Page", "Privacy Policy" (and similar terms) being yielded is sometimes caused by the original URL no longer being available, and the website's servers are redirecting it to a generic landing page. For some websites this can happen for pages that require a subscription to view. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 15:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:44, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that the problem that results in "About Us", "Contact Us", "Home Page", "Privacy Policy" (and similar terms) being yielded is sometimes caused by the original URL no longer being available, and the website's servers are redirecting it to a generic landing page. For some websites this can happen for pages that require a subscription to view. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 15:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:44, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that the problem that results in "About Us", "Contact Us", "Home Page", "Privacy Policy" (and similar terms) being yielded is sometimes caused by the original URL no longer being available, and the website's servers are redirecting it to a generic landing page. For some websites this can happen for pages that require a subscription to view. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 15:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

kerning
The other day I stumbled upon ''Barbus sp. nov. 'Pangani''' as an article title:

I have modified  to properly render that title:

While I was doing that, I simplified the whole of the function:
 * without leading or trailing quote marks:
 * simple wikilinks with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * complex wikilinks with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * simple wikilinks with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * complex wikilinks with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * complex wikilinks with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * complex wikilinks with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * complex wikilinks with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:
 * plain text with leading, trailing, or both quote marks:

Part of the simplification was to use 'empty' and  tags instead of splitting the title apart and wrapping part of it in  tags:
 * live:
 * sandbox:
 * sandbox:
 * sandbox:
 * sandbox:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:31, 27 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Nice. Does module kerning apply to quote as well? I don't remember. If it does, I believe there are additional kerning cases there. Just something to keep in mind for whenever. 65.88.88.69 (talk) 22:12, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * No, but not really necessary because quote is a free-form parameter that does not contribute to the citation's metadata. When quoted text begins with single- or double-quote marks, editors can use:
 * and when when the quoted text ends with single- or double-quote marks, editors can use:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 22:34, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Kerning is applied for readability. I've no idea what that has to do with metadata. Also, for consistency's sake the output of this field (kerning included) should match the other fields automatically delimited with quote marks. As stated above there could theoretically be more kerning cases to quote. 64.18.9.199 (talk) 23:13, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The kerning code was written because all titles that cs1|2 wraps with quote marks contribute to the citation's metadata. We don't want editors using  and the other kerning templates in those titles because those templates emit styling that has nothing to do with the source's title:
 * At some point in the now long-forgotten past, the decision was taken to wrap the value assigned to quote in  tags. No doubt, if you seek through the archives you will discover that decision.  The css that supports the  tags is here.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:32, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Not helpful. Editors were using the kerning templates, and other tricks (I was one of them), in order to make citations legible to readers. You know, the constituency for which citations exist. The fact that the crude metadata scheme used here chokes on it is of no concern to the consumers or producers of citations. I am glad that you took the time to implement this some years back. It is still a metadata development issue, not a citation development one, but anyway. The quotation marks were added as automatic delimiters to a number of fields (title, chapter, quote etc.) because they are significant information that must be quoted verbatim, and because human editors were occasionally forgetting to do so, or would omit the close etc. Again, I don't understand why the tags are mentioned. Nobody is questioning the tags' suitability. This is about adding kerning to a value that is tagged already. 64.18.9.197 (talk) 00:01, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The kerning code was written because all titles that cs1|2 wraps with quote marks contribute to the citation's metadata. We don't want editors using  and the other kerning templates in those titles because those templates emit styling that has nothing to do with the source's title:
 * At some point in the now long-forgotten past, the decision was taken to wrap the value assigned to quote in  tags. No doubt, if you seek through the archives you will discover that decision.  The css that supports the </q> tags is here.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:32, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Not helpful. Editors were using the kerning templates, and other tricks (I was one of them), in order to make citations legible to readers. You know, the constituency for which citations exist. The fact that the crude metadata scheme used here chokes on it is of no concern to the consumers or producers of citations. I am glad that you took the time to implement this some years back. It is still a metadata development issue, not a citation development one, but anyway. The quotation marks were added as automatic delimiters to a number of fields (title, chapter, quote etc.) because they are significant information that must be quoted verbatim, and because human editors were occasionally forgetting to do so, or would omit the close etc. Again, I don't understand why the tags are mentioned. Nobody is questioning the tags' suitability. This is about adding kerning to a value that is tagged already. 64.18.9.197 (talk) 00:01, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Not helpful. Editors were using the kerning templates, and other tricks (I was one of them), in order to make citations legible to readers. You know, the constituency for which citations exist. The fact that the crude metadata scheme used here chokes on it is of no concern to the consumers or producers of citations. I am glad that you took the time to implement this some years back. It is still a metadata development issue, not a citation development one, but anyway. The quotation marks were added as automatic delimiters to a number of fields (title, chapter, quote etc.) because they are significant information that must be quoted verbatim, and because human editors were occasionally forgetting to do so, or would omit the close etc. Again, I don't understand why the tags are mentioned. Nobody is questioning the tags' suitability. This is about adding kerning to a value that is tagged already. 64.18.9.197 (talk) 00:01, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

|quote= fix
in the live module, quote works properly but standalone script-quote and trans-quote do not include the <q ></q> tag:

fixed in the sandbox:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:42, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Is there a parameter for "advisor" in cite thesis
There is a citation in the article artificial intelligence where the thesis advisor is notable person. Is there a parameter to list the thesis adviso in ? Should I use ? CharlesGillingham (talk) 22:02, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * There is no parameter for the advisor role. I'm not convinced that there should be such a parameter.  Did the advisor contribute to the thesis in a material way or was the advisor filling an administrative function?  If the former then name the advisor as an additional author; if the latter, leave the advisor out of the citation.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 22:26, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * There is not. others would be fine if you believe the advisor merits addition to the citation for whatever reason. IznoPublic (talk) 22:30, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If there is a use-case for this (the advisor seems to be present in dissertation metadata), I would propose an alias to "editor" with suffix (adv.). But others seems fine. 64.18.9.197 (talk) 23:30, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

i18n |script-&lt;param>= error message supplements
script-title and the like have error message supplements that specify the the reason for the error message. There are four of these which are embedded in the main module. In the sandbox, I have moved these supplemental messages to Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration/sandbox:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:43, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

dead link : add "url-status=dead", and then WHAT? And where is intelligence gone?
Hello. Found a dead link (in Álava, section "Demography and rural landscape"). So: 1) waste some 20 mns foraging in the irekia.araba.eus trying to find the "Su poblacion" page despite rather poor Spanish (un-)fluency. Nada, no surprise as it's a government site. 2) look for template for "cite web", which cheers me up a bit coz unlike the french wiki it can be found without having to add "template:" before writing "cite web", well done to yous. 2) find the "url-status= dead / archive-url=" thingie without excessive aggro, again well done to yous. 3) add this to the ref. 4) reload the page, expecting to find something like a string of options such as what is found in the Fr wk with "lien brisé= [input said broken link]", which then allows one to click on one of the options (usually "archive.is") to access the archived doc; from which one can either (a) find the new relevant page by copying some essential suit of words and searching for it on the web; or, failing that, (b) at least have in the ref that string of options including "archive.is" which, in most cases except PDFs, gives access to the archived page and thus access to its link which can then be added to your "archive-url=". 5) Nada again. 6) waste quite some more time coming here to detail the pbm, being thoroughly pissed off by then - as shown by what follows. HtF* are we supposed to find links of archived pages if you don't provide the means for it? No I do NOT want the answer to that question. I want anyone who comes on wk with a modicum of good will to be able to find the damn thing with minimum aggro and without having to become a *** I.T. expert, and in theory so do yous. Thus I, and in theory so should yous, want the ""url-status= dead" to provide the same thing as what "lien brisé= [input said broken link]" does in the Fr wk: an option that gives direct access to the archived page and therefore to the link that's supposed to be added to "archive-url=".

I am REALLY annoyed: the way this template is geared up at the moment is a sure sign of yous having lost touch with two essential things, just as governments do : Asking help from your tiny minute group of mateys here is no proper inte-l-ligence at all but the opposite of it. It's also very likely a reason why there are so few registerees who edit. To develop intelligence yous must ask precisely these people who are no regular editors; and for that you have to get out and look for them, which you clearly do not do. Instead you expect them to find you/s! That, is why i don't come here exposing the technical problem and meekly asking that please cn yous sort it out. Fk that: I do not give meekness to unintelligence and I neither expect nor want it in return. In return I want intelligent intelligence. I want yous, all of yous, to become inte-l-ligent: change your ways and start asking people who do not know anything but the very basics about technical shenanigans, who have no time for them nor interest in them. There are many such people who do nevertheless have knowledge that would be good here. So get out of your comfort zone, out of your little narrow circle. Appeal for help. That, is real, true and proper cement that gets ppl to-gether/gather more and deeper than any "social event", as technocrats call these. Why: because it has meaning and a goal. It takes a miracle for any kind of "social event" to have any of these two components and by then it's not called "social event" but "revolution". It's exactly 20 yrs since i did my first edit in wk. At that time we were happy if ppl would just put even only a raw link between the thingies, the [link title] was 3-tier wedding cake with a crown on it. In 20 yrs the refs templates have become increasingly complicated, even more so in the En wk. Well done people: you have now reached the point where it starts becoming unusable even by regular users. What's wrong with humans that they keep doing again and again and again that very same mistake ever since Upper Palaeolithic times, for heavens' sake? There is no animal I can think of that's a stupid as that. Haven't you had enough time to learn? We're all in the same boat, dammit. So bloody well learn to ask others beyond your comfort zone or we'll all be fucked once more. That doesn't apply only here, obviously, but it'd be a good start. I regularly see banners announcing various events which are all supposedly aiming at "making the community strive", every one of those being so totally irrelevant to me that I never ever even look at them. Plus, they reinforce the "select" idea, thus doing the exact opposite to what they're supposed to do. Gatherings : gotta have enough money and time to get there. Photos: gotta have a decent camera. Etc etc etc incl. voting which only ever helps the establishment maintain a facade but does not help us editors for one iota, same as in all politics. What would interest me are appeals for help in such matters as what's described here, saying what the problem is about + link to page that'd give more details and where to say our bit on things that impact every single edit. I definitely would read these, and if the debated matter was smthng that I have come across, yes of course I'd open the page and take the time to say how, where, why, and/or whatever idea's come from it if any. Plus I'd have the pleasure of participating in something directly useful, which is the one thing above all other things that brings people together. There are many of these issues. Starting with the banner that irrelevantly comes up in this very page if I put the underneath that section so as to keep the note nearby and it not ending up at the bottom of the page where it's disconnected from its origin; + of course that banner offers no solution to that nonsense.
 * Where is inte-l-lingence gone?
 * the basics = the majority of people. You've forgotten how it is for them / "us" as a pronoun that does not include yous.
 * intelligence, in its etymological sense = inter + ligare, meaning that you not only have forgotten how it is for us: to top it up you don't even know / remember how to get back in touch. Ligare, link, assemble, bind. Yeah, yous link among yourselves to ask each other what the others of your little group think of that can improve whatever. So it's a sort of brainstorming, meaning it's debated only among the very few people whom you are in touch with and who already more or less know about the subject. That's a ridiculously microscopic portion of the less than 0.3% of the accounts holders who are themselves regular editors.
 * one solution could be...?

I shan't come back on this page nor shall I talk about the subject anywhere else on any wk: I've said all I have to say and detailed all there was to detail from where I stand, both about the technical problem and about the absence of proper inte-l-ligence. Talking more about it would only make me "part of" and there's no way that's gonna happen, not as things are so far. I've said what I want and want no other thing. As for the form it's taken, unintelligence as described is one of those things that cannot be uprooted without significant bottock-prodding. I verily don't give a fig about being banned: 1) it would only give another proof that what I've said is even truer than what's said; 2) it sure won't stop me editing just as I've done for longer than most of yous; 3) it won't cut me from any crowd, i'm no part of any such thing. So, definitely no apologies: I'm not the one who should be sorry. Sod the bien-pensants outragés and other wikiatollahs of the same vein, I'm not one of yous and yous sure don't own any single bit of me. Keep your curses for your mirror where they belong. In fact, that telling off has brought me a handsome reward: a neighbour's just dropped one of the largest packages of goodies i've ever received for my chicken, worth a good week's supply of treats that's taken me longer to sort out than writing this has taken. So I definitely must have been doing something right there. A bon entendeur salut.

Signed : a VERY thoroughly annoyed Pueblo89 (talk) 14:35, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Summary
Since this is a very long-winded rant with, the basic summary is this And that (understandably) greatly annoys the user above. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:53, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * dead link doesn't behave like fr:Modèle:Lien brisé
 * dead (e.g. ) doesn't give a dead link notice, with links to archiving websites like fr:Modèle:Lien brisé does. This is functionality that's built in fr:Modèle:Lien web (the French equivalent of cite web).
 * Thank you for the summary. It has occasionally been an issue where users are confused how to mark a cite dead where they use dead as a flag for a dead link when they should use . --  Green  C  16:21, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't know that anyone has ever suggested that cs1|2 should create a list of archive-site search links when dead (or its predecessor yes) is present and archive-url is missing or empty. Could be done I suppose, but there are a lot of archive sites; which of those would we include? which of those would we omit?  Would a better solution be a dedicated page with an input box that accepts the 'dead' url and then somehow creates and displays a list of archive-site search urls?  I don't know if that is even possible...
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:58, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It could open a page like BookSources and display all possible archive URLs for the passed source URL using something like memento or memgator. The archive date is a problem as that would also need to be given. Theoretically it could be generated for every citation even those without an explicit archive url. Users can then pick out the best archive URL and fill it into the citation.  --  Green  C  18:03, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Isn't url-status dependent on archive-url? What is the issue here? 72.89.161.42 (talk) 18:16, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Isn't url-status dependent on archive-url? What is the issue here? 72.89.161.42 (talk) 18:16, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

EventStream API
In capturing URLs for saving at Wayback Machine via EventStreams API (page-link changes), some URLs are not being captured and trying to figure out why. For example 1248180. This is hard to test and I don't know how cs1|2 injects/expands URLs but if anyone has any experience or thoughts that would be great. -- Green  C  16:21, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * For most identifiers, cs1|2 concatenates a prefix onto the value assigned to the identifier parameter. For 1248180 the prefix is   which gives [//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1248180 //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1248180].  Prefixes are available in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration in the   table (currently at line 1903 for pmc).
 * There are some identifiers that are more complicated:
 * asin has asin-tld (Module:Citation/CS1/Identifiers line 726)
 * ol modifies the url according to the value in ol (Module:Citation/CS1/Identifiers line 1081)
 * there may be others.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:47, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Sounds like they are rendered strings like everything else in the module which wouldn't explain why EventStreams is not (possibly) seeing them. -- Green  C  17:49, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I would be very leery of auto-capturing any Wikipedia citation or any citation element for archiving without first verifying it for applicability and reliability. This is manageable when human editors preemptively archive a source with a discrete edit. A mass of unverified archives just adds another platform for suspect, a priori-low quality information. 72.89.161.42 (talk) 18:28, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Huh? That's the entire point of, which has wide consensus to operate. Izno (talk) 19:06, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes. I happen to think that the consensus is wrong, for the reasons stated earlier. I don't think that it is impertinent to occasionally remind that this issue was not tackled then, or since. 72.89.161.42 (talk) 19:24, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes. I happen to think that the consensus is wrong, for the reasons stated earlier. I don't think that it is impertinent to occasionally remind that this issue was not tackled then, or since. 72.89.161.42 (talk) 19:24, 3 October 2021 (UTC)

Questionable Sources
How does one tag a ref as potentially not being reliable, is there a parameter in the template to check? Did a quick search in the archives and saw a bunch of old conversations but guessing someone knows the answer. - Indefensible (talk) 04:50, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * That's not something that is done with these templates. See Reliable sources and the documentation for Unreliable source? as a good place to start. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:41, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for providing that info, was looking for that. - Indefensible (talk) 05:52, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Specify multiple URLs for newspaper clippings?
Newspaper stories sometimes span pages. When I make a clipping on newspapers.com, it's of a single page, and I have to make a separate clipping for the continuation of the story on another page. Is there a way to provide both clipping URLs in cite news? Right now, I'm doing a work-around of putting two cite news templates between one set of ref tags, and am just wondering if there's a cleaner method.

Example:

Schazjmd  (talk)  15:29, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Link the page numbers in pages:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:48, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Brilliant! Thanks, . Schazjmd   (talk)  16:03, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:48, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Brilliant! Thanks, . Schazjmd   (talk)  16:03, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Specify separate URLs for an encyclopedia and its article?




Citing a section or chapter in a book and citing an article in an encyclopedia seem similar, but in the latter case, as far as I see, one can't give a URL for the work as a whole in addition to a URL for the individual article. Is there a way to do so? If not, would it be desirable?

—2d37 (talk) 11:00, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Did you try this:
 * or, do I not understand the question that you are asking?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:19, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, that is just what I wanted, thank you. I failed to notice entry and entry-url, which don't appear to be very documented (or maybe I am just continuing to miss them). I'll add an example to the cite encyclopedia documentation, in case it will help the next editor who wants this. —2d37 (talk) 12:24, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * What about cite conference? entry seems to be an alias for section. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:55, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yep, article, chapter, contribution, entry, and section are all aliases of each other.
 * The original wikitext version of was written differently from  (which is different from other cs1 templates).  When we converted all of the individual cs1|2 templates to use Module:Citation/CS1, the goal was to be transparent.   is still more-or-less as it was because no one has taken the time to propose a suitable rewrite.
 * To make link both the paper and the proceedings this works:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:45, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I had been using title and url for the article and conference and conference-url for the conference, but I see now that that makes the article title italic, whereas article makes the article title quoted, as it should be. —2d37 (talk) 06:42, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
 * To make link both the paper and the proceedings this works:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:45, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I had been using title and url for the article and conference and conference-url for the conference, but I see now that that makes the article title italic, whereas article makes the article title quoted, as it should be. —2d37 (talk) 06:42, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:45, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I had been using title and url for the article and conference and conference-url for the conference, but I see now that that makes the article title italic, whereas article makes the article title quoted, as it should be. —2d37 (talk) 06:42, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I had been using title and url for the article and conference and conference-url for the conference, but I see now that that makes the article title italic, whereas article makes the article title quoted, as it should be. —2d37 (talk) 06:42, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Proposal: Use the document icon instead of the external link icon for documents
Following up from this VPR discussion, I'd like to propose that we change the external link icon for CS1 citations in which format is set to a document file type such as  so that it uses the document icon  rather than the external link icon. This will give a more appropriate signal to readers that clicking on the link will download a file for them, rather than taking them to a website page.

In technical terms, I'm told by that we would do this by modifying Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css similar to what it already does with links to Wikisource. Thoughts? &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 04:11, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Not a good idea. We should train users so they understand that clicking anything with the external link icon is external and a potential security hazard (it might not be a hazard now, but could be in a couple of years when scammers get hold of the website). A friendly document icon tells the unwary that this link is blessed by Wikipedia. Johnuniq (talk) 05:27, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * We already have a separate PDF icon for PDFs, among others; this isn't really any different than that. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 07:09, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Clicking on an online document will not necessarily explicitly download it. As is often the case with the useless pdf icon (I wonder if the majority of Wikipedia readers know what it signifies), browsers may use an embedded pdf viewer. Just like every other webpage, that item will be downloaded in local cache by default >90% of the time. The templates use the format parameter where the literal extension name with a wikilink to an explanation can be entered. Without any need for fancy icons that may break in a future MW iteration, or CSS workarounds. Instead of interminable ideas about minor presentation details, may I suggest, with all respect, to work towards adding proper citations to the vast majority of articles that need them. 64.18.9.196 (talk) 12:30, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It's difficult to indicate two independent properties in one symbol.
 * I, too, consider it important to tell users they are about to click on an external link for security/privacy reasons, but I also think that it is useful for them to know if the external link content typically can be processed with built-in browser capabilities or needs some plug-in or external program to be viewed, or if it is text, graphical, audible, animated, as, depending on the environment the user is in, it may be technically difficult or inappropriate to consume (i.e. when loading an image using a text browser, or when loading a sound file on a computer without sound, or where sound may disturb other people).
 * It might be possible to superimpose the "external link" and various types of "document" icons to indicate some of these properties at the same time.
 * Alternatively, we could override MW and stop showing the PDF icon for external PDF files and consistenty show the external link icon for any kind of external links instead. The file format can be specified by format which adds some "(format)" text. CS1/CS2 even has some code to auto-detect PDFs based on the file-extension - we could add a few more common file types (per above criteria) to that list.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:50, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The PDF does not originate from MW. It is entirely a local en.wp customization. IznoPublic (talk) 14:35, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The quantity of Excel sheets cited is probably insufficient to support a different icon in these modules. Moreover, I doubt an Excel sheet could be classified as a reliable source, anyway. IznoPublic (talk) 14:38, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * , if for example a government publishes census data in an Excel sheet, why wouldn't that be reliable? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 21:19, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * We use such reluctantly as it is not generally secondary. Izno (talk) 21:23, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The thing that matters for reliability is the source, not the format. There are plenty of legitimate uses of Excel spreadsheets if they're published by reliable sources or used for WP:ABOUTSELF information. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 21:55, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Support - passing this info along to users in a natural and unobtrusive way makes total sense. Clicking a link that goes to an excel file feels like a total bait and switch unless I know about it ahead of time. Retswerb (talk) 03:23, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Generic title
Hello, could "Database Error" be added to the Generic title list? Currently only 11 instances of this around but could point to other errors in the source. Keith D (talk) 21:28, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Update parameter?
I'm copying this here as it's a good question:


 * Is there any guideline on which date to use when a source is updated, in some cases several times? I've searched "Help" in vain. This article, for example, was published on July 30, 2020, and updated on August 20. Do we keep the original date or use the date of the last update? Space4Time3Continuum2x

What should we do? Maybe we need an "update=" parameter? Please ping us. -- Valjean (talk) 15:50, 12 October 2021 (UTC)


 * WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT indicates that you should cite the date of the document that you read. If it was updated later, it may no longer supports the cited statement or it may support an entirely opposite statement (so cite the earlier date). Similar logic applies if you read it later and it does or does not support a particular statement (so cite the later date). Izno (talk) 16:20, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * That makes sense. When using a citation template, how would that work? Is the "access-date=" parameter enough, or would an "update=" parameter be a good thing, since the URL doesn't change when an article is updated. -- Valjean (talk) 16:29, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Use date. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:00, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * That parameter is the original publication date and does not account for later revisions and updates. The URL doesn't change. -- Valjean (talk) 17:14, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Incorrect. That is the publication date associated with the work when you read it. --Izno (talk) 17:36, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Is that always the case? It seems that the original publication date stays the same, and sometimes the update date is then added along with the notification of the update/correction, so "incorrect" may not always be true. I don't recall ever seeing an example of the original date being removed or changed. Do you have an example of the exception that proves the rule? -- Valjean (talk) 15:04, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It is not relevant. You claim something in wikitext, and support the claim with a source that verified it on a certain date. If the source was updated and the wikitext claim is still supported as before, then the citation need not be changed. If the update no longer verifies the wikitext, the problem is not the citation, whose original date still supports the claim. In this case the wikitext should be edited: either state that "at a previous date/iteration/etc. such-and-such happened" or edit the wikitext with the updated information and edit the citation by inserting the corresponding version of the source. 65.88.88.46 (talk) 15:32, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * That is current practice. I'm suggesting we make that process smoother by including it as a parameter. I recognize that false claims and controversy surround such updates, and that we would, in such cases, still need to note that in the text, but such updates aren't always connected to any controversy. -- Valjean (talk) 15:42, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * ??? Can you explain what you mean by "smoother"? If you need to present two different versions of events you would need two citations. This gives clarity to the wikitext claims. If you want to present one version of events, use the appropriately dated source. Citations have no continuity, and should not be treated as version repositories. You could always note, outside the citation that the information may no longer be current, but this seems convoluted. Unless the wikitext is historical update it, instead. 65.88.88.46 (talk) 16:12, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * In such convoluted cases, where different versions need sometimes-long explanation in the text, it would be handy to use one ref for the first/original version, and another ref for the updated version. That's all. That's what can be done with archived versions. It is actually possible to provide different dates and different URLs for different versions. With normal refs, the URLs don't change, but the ref, with an "updated" parameter, would be different, and should use a different refname. -- Valjean (talk) 18:28, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Again, these convoluted cases are a wikitext issue, not a citation one. If the claims are convoluted, simplify them. If several versions must be included, each one needs a separate citation. There must be a one-to-one relationship between the claim in the text and its verification. You can use one citation to prove many claims (by citing different in-source locations like pages). You cannot use one citation to prove 2 different versions of the same claim, whether using the same date/edition or 2 or more dates/editions. Moving the convoluted aspect to the citation instead of the text where it belongs makes it harder to verify. Obfuscation ensues. 65.88.88.69 (talk) 20:20, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * No disagreement. It is the production of the "separate citation" I'm after to make the "one-to-one relationship between the claim in the text and its verification" easier. -- Valjean (talk) 17:21, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I mean, I guess you can argue with me as to the correct use of the parameters, but as you are here asking the original question, that seems somewhat of a bait and switch as to your intent behind said question. :)
 * Yes, date is for the date of the source cited. If it has an amendment date and you read the source after that date, it goes in that parameter. There is 0 need for any additional parameters. Izno (talk) 19:05, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't mean to argue with you, and certainly not to trick you. Sometimes tangentially-related ideas get dealt with in the same thread. I'm just trying to learn the right way to do things. I've been here since 2003 and am still learning.
 * It doesn't make sense for the date in the date= parameter to change with varying versions, except for books, which is not the topic here. I've never heard of that being done. The original date never changes, which is why any updates that affect content here should be noted. Currently, we do that in the text. I'm interested in seeing that done with a new "updated" parameter. Can that be done? -- Valjean (talk) 19:17, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * At the end of the day, it's fundamentally just a new edition of the same work, which as with books ends up being a differently dated citation. So your 'except with books' is precisely the case here.
 * I would oppose a new parameter accordingly.
 * If you absolutely feel you must have both dates in the citation, put the later date in date and the earlier date in orig-date, contrary to what you believe it must be used for from 15:41 today. For most news articles those will not be separated by much so I see it as a waste of space in a citation section, but you seem convinced that you must do it the way you want. Izno (talk) 19:28, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Speaking only about the current date= parameter, it's just disturbing to learn that, without knowing it, I might find a ref which gives a different date than the original publication date. That just destroys my trust in the accuracy of references. Do you have an example of a reference where the listed date is not the original date of publication? If you've been editing this way, you should be able to provide such an example. I have always trusted the date to be the original date, and I shouldn't have to look at archived versions at the Internet Archive to figure out the original publication date. The consequences of a discrepancy can be consequential, as news of something happening is normally almost immediate, depending on the topic. It's also important to be able to know which source was the first with the story. Being careless with the date screws up our ability to know what's happened. Should I start an RfC on this topic so we can formally establish the one-and-only proper way to do this? -- Valjean (talk) 20:07, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, the only pertinent date is the one used in the version that verifies whatever is in wikitext. Whether that is the original date or not, is immaterial. If I may suggest, you are approaching this from the wrong end. Citations are there to prove that there is an actual source (hopefully reliable) for the wikitext and it is not the wiki editor's opinion or fancy, nothing else. And apart from that, there is always pre-emptive archiving. 65.88.88.69 (talk) 20:36, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Whether I have an example to that effect is basically irrelevant. I do not think a change proposal to include another parameter would be successful. Regardless, there are many editors watching this page and I'm sure some are itching to respond to you, since you are not responsive to what I am telling you.
 * Your hyperbole in the latter half of the paragraph is noted, without response. Izno (talk) 20:40, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Currently, we have these three, tweakable, basic parameters for website and newspaper articles date, access-date, archive-date. Note that orig-date is used for things like books, not for website and newspaper articles.

I am proposing we have an updated parameter for use when an update or correction has been made to a website or newspaper article or document. -- Valjean (talk) 15:41, 13 October 2021 (UTC)


 * The "original date" parameter is used to signify 1st editions, which are considered important. It is also static information. In books there is also the "edition" parameter which ties in. Material changes brought about by editions in books are rarer than in other, regularly updated sources, and therefore more significant per se. 65.88.88.46 (talk) 16:12, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Exactly, which is why it's irrelevant to this thread. -- Valjean (talk) 18:22, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * While orig-date is often used to signify 1st (and/or other prior important) editions, this is not its only purpose. Another common use is to specify the authoring date when it is different from when the work was actually published (can be important to track down the origin of some information for facts checking or for priority claims, or just for historical reasons), or when a work gets republished without changing the edition. orig-date can also be used to specify dates in alternative/deviating date formats as they might be stated in the source but are not accepted by date. The parameter accepts free-flow text, so, if the purposes it is used for isn't obvious from the context, you can (and should) specify the type of date as part of the parameter value.
 * If the publication date is different from a later update date, and both are important to be mentioned, the publication date goes into publication-date and the update date into date. These two parameters are not aliases. They are treated the same for as long as only one of them is given, but they behave differently when both are given at the same time. So, given the unfortunate ambiguity of the date parameter name, whenever a publication date is given you can simply use publication-date instead of date. This way, it becomes clear for later editors what kind of date was actually given. I consider it good editing practise to always choose the most specific parameter if multiple are available, while other's prefer shorter parameter names more. Example:
 * So, no need for an update-date parameter (unless we would strive for symmetry in parameter names (something I would support) and would make it an alias of date introducing it only for the purpose of eliminating the ambiguity of the date parameter in future citations).
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:35, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * date with publication-date is the date on which the work was, not it's original publication date or its amendment date. If you are going to recommend use of publication-date for whatever reason, please do not suggest another with the wrong meaning. Izno (talk) 20:41, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I understood you correctly. Let me try to clarify.
 * I am recommending to use publication-date only for the actual publication date, not for any other dates, of course.
 * Regarding date, perhaps it is just a question of how you define the date a work was written. Are we talking about the finishing date the bulk of a work was written (possibly long before publication) or when some bits were updated/corrected/amended later on? For the first case, I would use orig-date, for the later case I would use date. If both publication-date and date are present at the same time, date is the date which is used for metadata creation, so it should be the latest date of a published change used in the citation, not a date before publication.
 * Either way, these unfortunate ambiguities of the date parameter name are exactly the reason why I always propose specific parameter names rather than generic ones (even though they are longer to type: As short as possible without creating ambiguity, but not shorter). There isn't much we can do about existing citations, unfortunately, but we could use more self-documenting parameters in freshly entered citations. (That's also why I use author-last/first rather than last/first when I know they are authors, not editors or other contributors. In this case, they are even actual aliases, but author-last/first is self-documenting, whereas last/first is, at least potentially, ambiguous - some users use them for any kind of names, although they shouldn't.)
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:38, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Either way, these unfortunate ambiguities of the date parameter name are exactly the reason why I always propose specific parameter names rather than generic ones (even though they are longer to type: As short as possible without creating ambiguity, but not shorter). There isn't much we can do about existing citations, unfortunately, but we could use more self-documenting parameters in freshly entered citations. (That's also why I use author-last/first rather than last/first when I know they are authors, not editors or other contributors. In this case, they are even actual aliases, but author-last/first is self-documenting, whereas last/first is, at least potentially, ambiguous - some users use them for any kind of names, although they shouldn't.)
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:38, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Using |work= and |publisher= when both are non-italicized
I'd like to cite a news article from the website of KABC-TV, published by American Broadcasting Company, using cite news. However, doing the normal KABC-TV and American Broadcasting Company results in KABC-TV being italicized, which does not seem correct. Is there any way to force it not to be italicized (No italic recommends against it so as to not pollute COinS metadata), or is there another way to configure the parameters here? I'm not sure "KABC-TV" is similar enough to "American Broadcasting Company" to justify omitting the latter, and in any case I'm interested in the broader question, as I've encountered this same problem several times. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 17:52, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * My opinion (not particularly definitive): KABC-TV is an organization. The programs they publish might be titled something like ABC7 Eyewitness News or similar. So use the title of the program in the work parameter, and the name of the organization in the publisher parameter. You can only pick one of KABC-TV or American Broadcasting Company as publisher; I would pick whichever one created the content (KABC-TV for local pieces, American Broadcasting Company for syndicated). —David Eppstein (talk) 18:34, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Agreed. You can use KABC-TV, or KABC-TV if you think the wikilink provides value (and the KABC-TV article provides the reader a link to ABC).  If you are sourcing something from KABC-TV's website, you might not have a program for the work parameter.  Happy editing!  GoingBatty (talk) 18:42, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * They do seem to use ABC7 Eyewitness News in the titling of their web site (although the official html title is the clunky "Los Angeles and Southern California News, Weather, Traffic - ABC7 KABC"), so you could still use that as the work parameter for web content. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:14, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The HTML  element refers to the individual page, in this case (AFAICT) just their home/landing page. Sdkb didn't give us an actual URL for the specific page, or even the website, so we don't know what particular page is to be pointed at. In any case, the home page's   is unlikely to be the name of the work. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 02:25, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
 * First of all, if you're choosing parameter values based on what you like italicized, you're heading in the wrong direction. And if you don't want whatever you choose as work (like KABC-TV) to be capitalized, then the solution isn't to choose a differnt value for work or to try to outsmart cite news; the approach to take in that case is to (try to) swing consensus away from italicizing the work (and good luck with that!). The work should be the work, and the publisher, if you need to declare it, should be the publisher value. Let the template do the formatting for you; that's its job.
 * The bottom of the home page says, "Copyright © 2021 ABC, Inc., KABC-TV Los Angeles". I would therefore not use American Broadcasting Company, as it's incomplete, and I do not think the complete string is so different from KABC-TV as to be necessary. However, I think what would do in this case is use abc7.com or, perhaps better, ABC7 Los Angeles. This last is what they appear to use (after the faux dash) in their   for individual story pages, like this and this and this. So for me: ABC7 Los Angeles,  with ABC, Inc., KABC-TV Los Angeles. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 02:25, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Work=abc7.com is bad advice. I really really really dislike putting hostnames as works. Hostname is a separate piece of metadata that we don't usually show to readers, and shouldn't. It's for browsers to navigate, and needs to be part of a url. Work should be the name of the site, not the address of the site. Think of it this way: if you want to tell your friends about those beignets you had for breakfast in New Orleans, would you tell them you went to 1039 Decatur Street, or would you say you went to Café Du Monde? Work should be the same: A name, not an address. If we have a lot of references formatted with hostnames as works, it's a problem that needs to be fixed, probably caused by editors who use insufficiently intelligent reference formatting software and then other editors who saw it done that way and incorrectly think it's the way it should be done. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:03, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
 * My rationale for that as a second preference is that they use it in their site, as in "By ABC7.com staff", for example, at this story. I generally don't like having "example.co.uk" as the work or website (param aliases), either, especially as that info is in the URL I can see when I hover my mouse (when I a mouse) over the link. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 07:47, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

Different outputs for editor field across two cite book templates
I can't figure out why, and I've tried playing around with different inputs to the cite book template, but on Operation Sandwedge you can see two citations listing editors rather than authors; one under "Knight" and one under "United States House Committee for the Judiciary". For the former, the editor credit is not listed in brackets, but the latter it is. I've tried matching the formatting for both, but even using a single "editor" field for "Knight, Peter" instead of first and last names, although this would seem to match exactly how the Committee cite is formatted, still results in two different outputs. Does anyone know what's causing this and how to standardise both uses? I have no preference for either but just would like to figure out how to have both display the same as each other. 𝄠ʀᴀᴘᴘʟᴇ ꭗ 15:21, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I haven't dug through the documentation yet, but adding year to the second one makes the display consistent. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:44, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Fantastic, thank you. 𝄠ʀᴀᴘᴘʟᴇ ꭗ 15:48, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Because United States House Committee for the Judiciary doesn't have date and because Knight 2003 does. When the citation only has editor names and date (or year) has a value, we don't want stacked parentheses:
 * Knight, Peter (ed.). (2003). Conspiracy Theories ...
 * To make these two citations have more-or-less the same rendering, change this:
 * to this:
 * I also removed ref because the long-form citation has a 'name' (United States House Committee for the Judiciary) that should have been used in the short-form citation so you should also change this:
 * to this:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:49, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I also removed ref because the long-form citation has a 'name' (United States House Committee for the Judiciary) that should have been used in the short-form citation so you should also change this:
 * to this:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:49, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:49, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:49, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Param suggestion: |page-url=
A lot of the citations that I see pointing to references on archive.org include urls to the specific pages in the page parameter as in 237. It seems like an additional parameter, perhaps named page-url, would be handy to keep track of this information separately. So far, I've been leaving the links like this because they don't appear to be breaking anything yet. Slambo <small style="color: black;">(Speak) 15:43, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
 * It should be an alias of url, not a new parameter. Only 1 URL, the more specific one should be entered in citations, with the page, or the first page in a page range. In any case, I would remove the url from the page param and insert the url param. If the citation includes a page number, it is understood that the link may lead to the pertinent page. If one needs to link multiple pages, short refs would be more apt imo. 50.74.114.218 (talk) 17:46, 20 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Why? The URL of the publication provides access to information on the context of the cited pages. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:04, 21 July 2021 (UTC)
 * That is correct. But also potentially confusing, in the sense of having two URLs pointing to different things, i.e. information/context about the work (the work's URL) and the in-work location (the page's URL). I am not certain the average reader will be able to navigate this with ease. I suppose personally I would include the work's URL in the full citation, and the page URLs on short references. But this is just a preference. 65.88.88.126 (talk) 16:54, 21 July 2021 (UTC)
 * We recently had a related discussion at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 78.
 * These page links are typically added by bots. When I first saw them added to articles a couple of years back I too thought they would be a bad idea (because they add clutter to the pages parameters), however, they are not as bad as they might look at first sight: Like you already observed, they are not breaking anything (in any of the page-related parameters, that is), because the links are automatically removed before using the page information for metadata.
 * Regarding the suggestion of having (only) one alias to url for a "page link" and for the proposal to have numbered page parameters (in the other thread), this wouldn't work:
 * To the contrary of what the IP stated, the pages parameter often contains a list of pages or even page ranges, and it is not at all desirable to split them up into individual pages or use short references for them. Splitting up into individual pages is only necessary when it is particularly important to document the exact locations where multiple independent statements are sourced. In the vast majority of cases, this is not important, and combining all references to a single publication and providing a list of pages is sufficient. In most cases, it is easy enough to flip through these pages to find the one supporting a specific statement, so having individual references for each of them would only add redundancy and clutter to the article. Short references add an extra layer of indirection and don't allow for backlinks, therefore they are often inconvenient to use - they kind of solve one problem by adding a bunch of other problems. Per WP:CITEVAR, they are not a requirement at all to use and many people do not (want) to use them because of their shortcomings. So, suggesting anything that would force us to split up citations is simply no solution at all.
 * Regarding numbered page links (as suggested in the other thread), this would require not only numbered page link parameters but also numbered page parameters, as otherwise it would be next to impossible to know which link belongs to which page. While this would be technically a workable solution, it would not be a good one, because it would make the list of pages even more difficult to read and add an enourmous amount of parameter clutter to citations. It would also make the code much more complex and difficult to maintain. I mean, we do have numbered parameters for the various types of contributors, but we don't have them because this would be a particularly great idea but simply because the template has a need to know the given name, surname and optionally the link to generate the proper representation for display and metadata purposes from this, and the complexity of naming schemes makes it impossible to just provide a name list and let the template reliably extract the informational bits from it. It would work in some cases, but not in general, that's why we need a set of numbered parameters for the names. However, although there is a huge variety in page numbering schemes, they are still much simplier than names and therefore the code can be made smart enough to reliably extract all the necessary information from a single parameter argument.
 * Finally, there was a complaint that it would be a bad design decision for parameters to accept multiple types of input. I can see where this comes from, and it sometimes holds true, but not for citation templates in Wikipedia. I consider our approach to be kind of object-oriented (or at least we try to give this impression to users). There are limits, but ideally, you could throw any kind of "data objects" holding the relevant information at a parameter and the template would be able to figure everything out by itself. From the viewpoint of users, the most intuitive way to give a link is to use our standard Mediawiki wikitext syntax. Also, it simply should not matter if they provide a single page, a page range, a list of single pages, a list of page ranges, any kind of combination of them, a linked page, linked page range, list of linked pages or linked ranges, you got it... (Not in the case of page-related parameters, but for completeness, in some cases, parameters also accept some symbolic keywords in addition to text objects.) What can be more simple and intuitive from a user's perspective than to allow them to use the normal Wikitext syntax and just provide a list of data items? Actually, it can't be easier than this. (Unfortunately, we can't do this for names, at least not without introducing a special syntax, which would defeat the idea.)
 * One more thought on this: As stated above already, I too do not particuarly like these long strings such as 237 (but I've come to accept them given that they add useful information for readers and that citations would only become longer when using special parameters for this). However, in many cases the first part of these links is the same as the link provided in the url parameter, like in https://archive.org/details/cihm_07495. For these cases, I can envision some kind of shortcut notation like [*/page/n255 237] https://archive.org/details/cihm_07495. This obviously would not work for all cases, but it would reduce the clutter and redundancy in many cases already.
 * Somewhat related:
 * Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_72
 * Help_talk:Citation_Style_1/Archive_72
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:11, 21 July 2021 (UTC) (updated 13:45, 13 August 2021 (UTC))
 * You say Short references add an extra layer of indirection and don't allow for backlinks,; however, I see back references to, e.g., 3270Intro, in IBM 3270. Admittedly it's a bit clunky, but it works. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:04, 21 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I meant backlinks from the "base citations" back to the various short references. In your example, if you arrive at e.g. the "3270Intro" citation, there are no links to go to all the short references pointing to this entry; you would have to search for them by going through all the references. However, if I would arrive there, I would want to see all the other locations citing from this publication. With an extreme amount of work something like this could be constructed manually, but it would be prone to errors and very difficult to maintain. In your specific example of "3270Intro" there are only two short references pointing there, so they could be easily merged into one with no loss of information. Even in cases such as "3270DS", which have many more short references, most of them are referring to adjacent pages in chapter 3, so it is probably enough to refer to chapter 3 and perhaps the page range, but not to individual pages, and thereby avoid most if not all those short references. If there is a particularly important statement to be referred to, quote and quote-pages can be helpful as well. If the individual page numbers should be preserved, rp can be used for the individual pages and pages for the combined pages. This way, the additional layer of indirection can be avoided and automatic backlinks are possible.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:00, 21 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Using works well when you are only adding a page number to the base citation, but what is the equivalent to ? --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 21:52, 21 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I would just append it, separated by a comma, like in . Alternatively, you could probably use something like or . Even page links can be used in combination with , although this may sometimes require to use of numbered parameters like  [Update 2021-08-11: Calling conventions have been improved, this is now no longer necessary].
 * However, WP:CITEVAR applies and you can use etc. if you want. My point above was mostly that multiple pages are perfectly fine in a citation (even when used to support multiple independent statements in an article) and that there is no requirement and often no benefit splitting citations into individual short references - it comes with a price, and the disadvantages are often larger than the advantages - as usual, it depends on the circumstances. I made this point to illustrate why we need to support multiple pages and why proposals which would allow us to deal only with single (or related) pages in a citation do not lead anywhere.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:53, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Adding multiple page numbers that support different statements in a single citation is not a problem, but isn't this discussion about page links? It seems to me a full citation with multiple page links is unwieldy and full of clutter. A short ref with the specific page link for the specific wikitext seems more intuitive and easier to understand. 65.88.88.127 (talk) 17:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Using, and  gives me ,   and . The second and third have the right information, but the location is likely to be long and should be in the reference list rather than inline. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:35, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Still an issue with book volumes
All these months later, and the issue with book volumes is still not being addressed. I understand why we don't want an explicit "volume" with a journal/magazine. I do not understand the issue with books. If Birds of North America has 13 volumes, displaying "Birds of North America. 2." does not, to most humans, clearly indicate that the 2 refers to volume 2 – particularly given that the average reader probably has no idea that there are 13 volumes in the set. Why can template not behave differently depending on whether the item is a book or a journal?! I know it's possible to do so, so somebody must have some rationale for why we don't. Please explain! MeegsC (talk) 20:25, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Inertia, basically.
 * Previous discussions have yielded two proposed alternative styles for rendering volume, number/issue (only used with journals) and pages:
 * {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

! !! Journal !! Not journal !! Notes ! Current ! Proposal 1 ! Proposal 2
 * 3 (4): 12–56. || 3, pp. 12–56.
 * Long volume names are not bolded, but vol. 3 is considered an error.
 * 3 (4): 12–56. || vol. 3, pp. 12–56. ||
 * colspan="2" | vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 12–56.
 * Non-journals would not have a number or issue.
 * }
 * The current definition of "journal" is
 * , or
 * // with journal specified.
 * I believe we should offer these alternatives for wider consideration. Kanguole 09:37, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:07, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Adding magazine to the current row:
 * {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
 * {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

! !! journal !! magazine !! others ! Current ! Proposal 1 ! Proposal 2
 * 3 (4): 12–56. || Vol. 3 no. 4. pp. 12–56. || 3, pp. 12–56.
 * 3 (4): 12–56. || colspan="2" | vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 12–56.
 * colspan="3" | vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 12–56.
 * }
 * Kanguole 14:10, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I support the proposed standardization, but I think that the "scientific" nomenclature might still be desirable to have in heavily academic articles, therefore, I suggest to introduce a periodical-style or serial-style (or whatever) parameter to select the desired format if this is not the default already. (At a later stage, this could be supported by templates similar to the cs1-dates parameter of templates use dmy dates/use mdy dates to globally switch the display format for all citations in an article instead of having to use it in individual citations. I had some experimental code for this a year ago, but it would have to be adjusted to the current significantly changed code base.)
 * I believe that having such an option to override the default would significantly raise community acceptance of a general change to a more standardized format - without it, I already see the next tumult emerging from militant proposers of one of these formats. With such a parameter implemented, we would still instantly have a consistent format in the majority of articles (the goal, we want to achieve), but allow editors to override the default to address special needs in specific citations (and articles). Best of both worlds.
 * We could either use Proposal 1 as the default formats for the various templates and the parameter would allow to override the default and select the other format, or, we could choose Proposal 2 as the new general default format for all citation types and the parameter would have to be used in individual citations to switch to the scientific format.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 16:53, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I would be strongly against introducing another style configuration parameter. It would be another knob for people to twiddle and fight over, and we already have plenty of those clogging our watchlists. I would rather have a less-preferred option than that.
 * As for raising acceptance, I don't think anyone out there loves bold volumes for books. The choice between the other two should be settled at an RFC. Kanguole 17:11, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Design by rfc; how appalling.
 * I too, am opposed to yet-another-style-parameter.  renders the academic-journal-style. If you don't like that, use  or .  No need for special parameters.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:58, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * If we want people to be able to use cite magazine - then it needs to be added to Wikipedia:RefToolbar/2.0 - otherwise most editors will just use the templates which the tools force upon them.Nigel Ish (talk) 18:29, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * You'll get no opposition from me but, good luck with that:
 * Maybe, if enough editors make noise about it, someone will do the necessary (thankless) labor that will give them what they want. Perhaps you?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:12, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, if as indicated by the discussions on the RefToolbar page, the tool is not being maintained, then it should be deactivated.Nigel Ish (talk) 20:34, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that you are mistaken. Multiple javascript pages implement WP:RefToolbar.  The tool is mostly stable so there is little to do to it.  Still, these parts of it were updated this year:
 * – this is the English Wikipedia; why do we care about the German version here?
 * As I said before, if enough editors make noise about it, someone will do the necessary (thankless) labor that will give them what they want. If you want the change, recruit enough editors who also want the change, or, failing that, do it yourself.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Design by RfC has proven to result in inconsistent, incoherent and typically less-powerful solutions. But forcing our own (typically great ;-) ideas onto the community is also no option. I mean, even here in this dedicated place where most of us have quite some experience with citation formats we often have vastly different views in regard to the best solution to a problem, clearly indicating that we have a diverse array of needs and therefore need flexibility to address them. That's why I think we should give the users some guidance (in form of reasonable defaults and good documentation) but also the necessary flexibility so that they can (if they need to) get the results they want to suit more special requirements. Otherwise, they will either complain about our templates or not use them. Both is unsatisfactory for them and us - and for the project as a whole.
 * I agree that in principal it would be enough to let cite journal use the scientific format and cite magazine the verbose format - basically that's a style-parameter in disguise. However, we have readers switching between these templates based on the nature of the periodical which would defeat the idea to choose the template based on the display format.
 * To sum it up, without a style-parameter to optionally override the default I could still support proposal 1, but not proposal 2.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 02:05, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * we have readers switching between these templates based on the nature of the periodical - I do that frequently, because I often find that some people are inappropriately using , and  for magazines - for me, it's not a case of choos[ing] the template based on the display format but of choosing the most appropriate template for the source. Each of these four has documentation that gives such advice:
 * - academic and scientific papers published in bona fide journals
 * - articles in magazines and newsletters
 * - news articles in print, video, audio or web
 * - web sources that are not characterized by another CS1 template
 * I believe that the people who do not use do so partly because they don't read the documentation, but mainly because it's not offered by the cite tool that they use (see post by Nigel Ish at 18:29, 28 July 2021 (UTC) and the reply by Trappist. So long as that remains the case, there will always be the need to amend the citation. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 09:58, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's right. In fact, I'm doing this as well, but I'm reasonably happy with the difference in output formats between cite journal and cite magazine. I think we should continue to maintain this idea by choosing the most suitable parameter journal or magazine based on the nature of the periodical. Typically, we would use journal in cite journal and magazine in cite magazine, but following Trappist's comment to choose the template depending on the desired output format above, we would need to acknowledge that some people might have deliberately chosen to use cite journal for magazine or cite magazine for journal, and that, if this makes sense in a particular article rendering as a whole, we should leave this alone.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:14, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that what you are saying without actually voicing it is that, , all become redirects to the canonical template .   then renders volume/issue/page in the style dictated by the work parameter alias that is used in the template.  That would likely be a significant challenge, mostly elsewhere than in Module:Citation/CS1.  Some one or some series of bots would need to convert existing templates; tools like WP:RefToolbar would need updating, etc.  I rather like this idea but I foresee torches and pitch forks because en.wiki editors hate, hate, hate change...
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * - articles in magazines and newsletters
 * - news articles in print, video, audio or web
 * - web sources that are not characterized by another CS1 template
 * I believe that the people who do not use do so partly because they don't read the documentation, but mainly because it's not offered by the cite tool that they use (see post by Nigel Ish at 18:29, 28 July 2021 (UTC) and the reply by Trappist. So long as that remains the case, there will always be the need to amend the citation. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 09:58, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's right. In fact, I'm doing this as well, but I'm reasonably happy with the difference in output formats between cite journal and cite magazine. I think we should continue to maintain this idea by choosing the most suitable parameter journal or magazine based on the nature of the periodical. Typically, we would use journal in cite journal and magazine in cite magazine, but following Trappist's comment to choose the template depending on the desired output format above, we would need to acknowledge that some people might have deliberately chosen to use cite journal for magazine or cite magazine for journal, and that, if this makes sense in a particular article rendering as a whole, we should leave this alone.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 10:14, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that what you are saying without actually voicing it is that, , all become redirects to the canonical template .   then renders volume/issue/page in the style dictated by the work parameter alias that is used in the template.  That would likely be a significant challenge, mostly elsewhere than in Module:Citation/CS1.  Some one or some series of bots would need to convert existing templates; tools like WP:RefToolbar would need updating, etc.  I rather like this idea but I foresee torches and pitch forks because en.wiki editors hate, hate, hate change...
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I generally favor some form of Proposal 1. Let cite journal use the shorter format. In cite magazine, get the page number next to the volume and issue number. (Currently if a publisher is specified, it splits the volume/issue from the page number.) In cite map, et al., tie the output to whether journal or magazine is used.For books though, I'd leave volume number next to title as a function of the title and retain the page number at the end, but otherwise add the "vol." text to the volume number for consistency.  Imzadi 1979  →   22:46, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Proposal 2 is the only scheme that makes sense for a project like Wikipedia. It is easily understandable by readers. The comma separator will have to be explained to editors since it violates style. This is because of the current rigid implementation of separators into "style 1" and "style 2", that carries no functional utility. 64.18.9.208 (talk) 23:40, 28 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Support Proposal 2 Although I would be happy enough with Proposal 1. Agree with Imzadi about not splitting title from volume. I thought that the maintainers already turned this down. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  23:49, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I'd personally prefer Proposal 2, but I think there would be too much inertia to completely move away from the abbreviated journal format.  Imzadi 1979  →   00:16, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Strongly prefer 1, but could live with 2. Status quo is unacceptable. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:22, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Support Proposal 1; I agree that the status quo doesn't work at all. And proposal 2 certainly "isn't the only one that makes sense", despite what an anonymous IP might assert. I'm assuming that if the "number" field is left blank, that parameter won't appear at all – i.e. vol. 2, pp. 12–56. MeegsC (talk) 10:28, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Are you saying that readers are better served by different (and convoluted) renditions of issue and volume depending on the use of a template they know nothing about? And why is an assertion by something called "MeegsC" any better on the face of it? 64.18.9.201 (talk) 11:16, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Prefer Proposal 2 but also support Proposal 1 and strongly prefer either to the status quo. I think (based on no evidence, obvs) that the majority of editors who add citations to journal articles are probably happy with the academic shorthand since they are accustomed to it; hence the change will annoy them since style changes are always annoying.  On the other hand, (still based on no evidence) our average reader probably hardly ever looks at an academic journal and is left to guess what the terse encoding means.  I think we should prioritize clarity for the reader over the comfort of familiarity for the editor.  This goes doubly for books where the shorthand is not, as far as I know, widely used. Wham2001 (talk) 11:11, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Strong support for Proposal 1. This gives the output for journals and books I'd expect to see in scientific literature. Books use Volume or Vol, while journals just have the number, which may be in bold (most?), italics (a few) or with no emphasis. — <span style="font-family:Arial;background:#d6ffe6;border:solid 1px;border-radius:5px;box-shadow:darkcyan 0px 1px 1px;"> Jts1882 &#124; talk 12:17, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Proposal 2 - is unambiguous, where proposal 1 leaves ambiguity and leaves you scrtching your head as to what the numbers mean. And the opportunity of mixing styles in a single article is not very good. Keith D (talk) 12:50, 29 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Strong Support for Proposal 1. From a biology viewpoint the vast majority of of scientific journal citations are in an APA style-style which renders volume 8, issue 10 as 8(10) or 8(10) or 8(10). I feel it would be strange to include "vol." in a biology citation, but not unheard of. However, per MeegsC there really needs to be a change, there are so many scientific books published in volumes and cited with words to note the volumes. Jack (talk) 14:11, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Proposal 1 - there is no way we can do proposal 2 without getting a lot of immediate friction from the community that will inevitably result in a workaround like the proposed periodical-style above which introduces yet more complication. Image the problem of creating a citation via automated means and trying to determine the right style to use for a particular article; then we need to have something like cluttering the top of every article.  No, don't go that route. Proposal 1 maintains what already exists for  which is by far the largest of all and will have the least friction while fixing the problem with the other smaller templates. --  Green  C  14:40, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not a science publication. It is also not a special-purpose vehicle for professionals of any sort, including those in the field of biology. There is also the argument that a solution tailored to the entire community (its readers) has to be bypassed because a minority (its editors, or a subset thereof) may cause a fuss. Not very surprising. "Wikipedians" :) often act with a sense of ownership, and also often throw fits. In the meantime Wikipedia, rather unselfconsciously, proclaims its own worthlessness. 195.123.233.197 (talk) 15:55, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Definitely agree with the IP here. Articles are not WP:OWNed by any particular individuals, and if we decide here that using vol. 3 no. 2 is better than using 3 (2), a proposition I strongly agree with, then it is right and proper, for the benefit of our readers that we allow that to propagate to all articles which cite journals. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 10:51, 23 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Who is "we"? Experience has shown, repeatedly, the community all million plus are sensitive to changes of status quo, and when "we" decide to changes things for their "readers" own good according to our expert and correct opinions, the 'pitchforks' come out and trenches are dug. IMO this is a more significant change then say accessdate vs. access-date and you know how that went, the battle lines now so hardened it is a dead issue, it will never get fixed. Once wide-scale attention is made to the issue, you loose control. Stay as close as possible to status quo and fix the small things that really need fixing, it will be successful. Come back later and deal with cite journal as a separate issue because chances are it will be no-consensus. --  Green  C  20:47, 23 August 2021 (UTC)
 * You are correct that any challenge to the status quo will cause a disturbance. Whether that should dissuade from applying the better solution is the question. If it does, mediocrity wins again. This is a norm here. After all, this is a project where without any sense of irony or self-awareness, the majority of its content is designated suspect by default. There is a small minority of so-called "good articles". Which one would think, should immediately give rise to the question, why should an encyclopedia publish articles that it has itself designated as non-good? Compared to such institutional schizophrenia the pitchforks no doubt already being sharpened over this thread seem like toothpicks. 195.123.233.197 (talk) 00:21, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Proposal 2. I've long thought that the 3(2) format is not ideal for use in an encyclopedia, where most readers are not specialists and may not automatically know what it means. It's far better to explicitly spell out what is meant, using the vol. and no. nomenclature, as per the Chicago or MLA citation style. This should apply to any publication be it a journal, book, magazine or anything else. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 10:47, 23 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Proposal 1. However, I would like a means to request that cite magazine use the same nomenclature as the publisher for the issue. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:18, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Implementation
It seems to be universally agreed that bold volume numbers for non-journals are unacceptable, but opinion is divided on whether to retain them for journals, i.e. there is no consensus for change there. So I've changed the sandbox to extend the magazine formatting to all non-journals.

Kanguole 19:11, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Separator between volume and number

 * Looks good. Here are two more for comparison (no change):


 * However, I think we should put at least a comma (possibly a dot in CS1) between the volume and the number info. It looks odd to me that there is no separator between them even in the simple cases above, but even more so in more complicated cases (for illustration purposes I changed the volume and number parameters to contain lists).
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:48, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, the current presentation of is unchanged, and now extended to other non-journals. However, the combination of volume and number should only occur with magazines and journals, so their formatting is independent of this change.  Kanguole 15:27, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I'd add that I've never seen lists in volume or number in the wild – it's usually 3/4 or 3–4. If an article is published in several parts with different page ranges in different issues/volumes, they would have to be separate cites. Kanguole 15:34, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I have, although rarely and not in combination in both volume and number. I used it here as an example to show more clearly, that there is something missing between the volume and the number. I basically "hijacked" this thread for the possible discussion of adding a comma (or dot), because this would be another minor change likely accepted (if even noticed) by the masses, and because this thread already has a nice list of rendered citation templates for quick comparison of the output.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 16:48, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Done. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:19, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

cite news documentation
Should there be some text added about the general lack of need for the use of editors for newspapers and such. In many cases, the editors probably had nothing to with the article. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 16:00, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * No, if authors and/or editors are specified, they belong into the citation, no exceptions. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 16:36, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Is there any publication out there that formats citations that way? 207.161.86.162 (talk) 04:48, 1 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Newspaper/newsagency (and less frequently) magazine articles may not carry a byline, and also there may be cases of newspapers/magazines with the same name. There is some merit in adding the editor, to find quickly the right news source, especially when the publisher/location is unknown/absent. Another consideration would be when articles are reprinted under different editors (in the same or another news source). In the unlikely case of differences in original vs. reprint, the respective editor should be indicated. Also, all reference databases for news sources include the editor and sometimes sub-index the works by that field, which means the source could theoretically be found quicker by adding the editor info. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 16:40, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I am thinking more like the newspaper the new york times. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 16:48, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I would not add the editor in such cases unless of course the item is signed by her/him or perhaps, in the case of citations of editorials. Afaik, the NYT has an "editorial board", so maybe the correct way to depict this would be to use editorial. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 16:56, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Matthiaspaul, are you saying that every reference cited to The Guardian needs to include the name of the editor of The Guardian? -- Alarics (talk) 20:55, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If the editor is actually specified as "The Guardian" that would be appropriate, but in most such cases, staff writers are not mentioned at all, and "The Guardian" would be just the name of the news outlet. For staff writers we typically write something like  (although I personally don't like this very much (for its bad machine-readability) and instead propose to standardize the case by introducing a special keyword like staff for it, which could be (actively) ignored by the template for now, but could also be evaluated if we would happen to run into a use case for this in the future - without editor (the template can't see the HTML comment), we never know if no editor was specified in the publication or if the author providing the citation was just too lazy to add it.) --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:26, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
 * There are enough valid use cases for adding editors to periodical citations that I definitely wouldn't want this to be an error, even though it's usually not the right thing to do. One that comes to mind is when the periodical publishes a special issue or special section (which you can name using the department parameter) and you want to cite both an individual title and author within that section or issue, and the editors of the whole section or issue. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:00, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Here's an example of a citation in this style that I used today:
 * Here, if you go to the DOI you will get a collection of mini-articles, collected into a single journal article, edited by Stewart, from which I wanted to cite the mini-article by Williams. I think this formatting is a reasonable way of doing that, although the ordering of metadata by the template leaves something to be desired (it should more clearly indicate that the author-title and editor-department are paired, rather than shuffling them in an ordering author-editor-title-department that makes less sense). —David Eppstein (talk) 07:38, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Re the order of display. I believe it has been discussed previously. It has to do with the editor role applying to the entire work (journal) not parts of it. Previous discussions about adding editor roles to in-source locations went nowhere. It may be easier to do something like Editor (column ed.) which is a bit clunky. Btw, it would perhaps be more accurate to use the contributor set here, but it is not available for journals. 71.247.146.98 (talk) 11:53, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I actually think WP editors do a relatively bad job of including periodical editors anyway and would not super such a change. IznoPublic (talk) 14:34, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I actually think WP editors do a relatively bad job of including periodical editors anyway and would not super such a change. IznoPublic (talk) 14:34, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Page, pages, total pages, page range
I generally use the sfn citation style, with the sources in an alphabetical list at the end of the article. This lets me cite different pages in each source at different places in the article. In the sfn I give the page or pages being cited, e.g.

In the source definition, I would like to give the total number of pages, and in the case of a journal article, the page range, e.g.

This would display something like Any problem with introducing this? It must have been discussed before. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:19, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * (248 pages)
 * , pp.9–39 (31 pages)
 * Add that information after the citation template if you must, as you have done above. It is not a typical or encouraged practice in the English Wikipedia, even though it appears to be common for other languages. Also, you don't need "31 pages" when the complete page range is already listed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:26, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * (edit-conflict) It has been discussed before. There are users who think that the total page information does not belong into a citation, but there are also users who requested it.
 * In fact, it is rarely given in citations, although I have seen examples where it was actually given. Above you give the example of a bibliography, this is another example where the total number of pages is actually quite common to be given.
 * Personally, I always provide the information when I have it available from a reliable source (the publication in front of me, not some Amazon or Google books listings as they are very often wrong), because I actually find this information quite useful myself when I find it in a reference. It helps to get a grip on if the publication is substantial enough to be worth the trouble of getting a copy in general, and it allows to quickly verify the (often inaccurate) page range info and estimate copying and postage costs when obtaining a work from a library.
 * Since CS1 does not have a parameter for this yet, so far I add the information following the citation in parentheses (like ), just like you do, but I would prefer to have a dedicated total-pages parameter for this, because this would ensure a consistent format instead of each editor having to invent his own nomenclature. It would be machine-readable, thereby we would also help to correct the many incorrect total-page info entries in the wild. There even is a COinS entry for this, also indicating that this is sometimes useful info to have. Wikidata has d:Property:P1104 for this and cite Q is already prepared to support this once CS1/CS2 would add support for it. Some citation templates in other language-entities of Wikipedia have a parameter for this as well.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:31, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The French w:fr:Modèle:Ouvrage has |passage= and |pages totales=. I suppose technically there is a difference between a citation, where we say "this is where this information comes from" and a bibliography entry, where we say "here is what we know about this source." The citation could be short sfn, giving the page and pointing to the bibliographic entry, which is the style I prefer. Giving both page range and total pages is redundant, but that is what JSTOR does, e.g. . Aymatth2 (talk) 16:22, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The JSTOR approach maybe a hold-over from older days, where such approaches would be used in articles that did not have continuous pagination, and the ToC was not useful in inferring the page range of an article. The actual page range in a biblio entry may not have been an unbroken range at all, just the article's first and last pages. The page count would be useful in showing the actual number of pages the article occupied, since the ToC would not be able to show it. In books, the total pages are shown in bibliographic/reference databases, but this is for reasons other than citing sources. Even the most used trade references (Nielsen's Bookdata, Bowker's Books In Print) in my experience do not show the total pages (or bytes, or running times) unless you drill down into a record's "Detail View". 65.88.88.126 (talk) 16:53, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * So a 4-page article could be spread over 6 pages by full-page ads. Simpler maybe to show pp.7–12 (4 pages) than the more accurate pp.7,9–10,12 (4 pages). Aymatth2 (talk) 20:51, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * For another example, the German citation template de:Template:Literatur has Umfang for this.
 * You are right, there is a difference between a citation and a bibliography entry, but CS1/CS2 templates are intended and designed to be used for both purposes.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:10, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The main argument for not adding |total-pages and |page-range parameters is it would make the template documentation even longer to support information most editors would not bother to provide. The reasons for adding them are that it ensures consistent formatting and supports greater mechanization in generating or checking bibliography entries. Aymatth2 (talk) 20:51, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The total number of pages is irrelevant. This has been brought up several times before, see the archives of this page. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:35, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * A citation identifies the source, and as you say the total number of pages in the source does not help with that. But as points out, CS1/CS2 templates are intended and designed to be used for bibliography entries as well as citations. In Konstantine Lortkipanidze it is reasonable to list the number of pages in the subject's works. The template renders "|pages=303" as "p. 303", which does not look like a page count. (303 pages) would be more obvious. In Konstantine Lortkipanidze there is perhaps less value in giving the page count, but there seems no reason to omit the information if available. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:36, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * p. 303 is obvious, it's a single page. p. 303-310 is equally clear as a range of pages. It's a red herring to say 303-310 might only be 3 pages interspersed with adverts as the point of the template in either a citation or a bibliography is to identify, for the reader, where to find the information.  It is not to comment, directly or by inference, on how voluminous the author's work is. Nthep (talk) 06:47, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The purpose of a bibliography entry is also to identify the source, and the total number of pages is not relevant to that. A list of an author's works is a special case, and I would argue that it does not justify adding a parameter that should not be used elsewhere. There is always the option of adding text after the template. Kanguole 08:51, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia probably contains several hundred thousand lists of authors' works. A bibliography in a book or scholarly article often gives the total number of pages. I suppose a minimalist would say all that is needed is page number and DOI, while a maximalist would say we should describe the source as fully as possible. It seems to be more a question of taste than of principle. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:35, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I dispute the second claim. The standard style guides (Chicago, APA, MLA) are fairly consistent on what information to include, and none of them recommend the total number of pages. Kanguole 12:47, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I was more thinking of a bibliography holding a list of an authors works. When citing periodical articles the cite would typically give author+page, and the bibliography would give the page range for the article. We can do that with sfn. But if we are combining the cite and source definition as with &lt;ref>&#123;{citation...}}&lt;/ref> at present we cannot give both the page and page range. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:26, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Strong support for total-pages. Editors frequently misinterpret pages as "total pages". It's such a big problem trying to link online books only to end up displaying the empty last page. The total-pages will help reduce (not eliminate) the misuse of pages and increase accuracy of the citation. This is evidence-based, the reality of what users do in practice. There is behavioral demand for total-pages, if we don't provide it, they will do it anyway, and in such a way that it can only be fixed manually.  --  Green  C  15:00, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Disagree, I'm afraid. Assuming the documentation is clear, nobody should be obliged to accommodate whatever editors misinterpret. What is the use-case here? The total pages info is immaterial in a citation. It does not help in locating the source and verifying the wikitext in probably 99.99% of possible cases. That is a fact. If editors insist otherwise when clear guidance is given, they are wrong and there can be no further discussion. There seems to be confusion because some think that these templates are or should be used as bibliography templates. They are not, and using them as such is outside of proper citation usage, which is the urgent and necessary application for them. The templates are complicated enough to use without the added overhead of bibliographical entries. 64.18.9.196 (talk) 15:55, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Sometimes what editors ought to do according to what we tell them to do and what they actually do is interesting. --  Green  C  16:18, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It's the same as with most features, some people need them, others do not. Our general goal here is to set up the best and most comprehensive (and in the long term also most reliable) encyclopedia on earth, and the intent of this talk specifically is to develop citation templates enabling editors to do that as they see fit in the most convenient way imaginable.
 * Over the years an uncountable number of people have asked for this feature here and in many other places at Wikipedia. Other Wikipedias have it for long, Wikidata has it, COinS has it, some style guides ask for it, including some English ones (i.e. the NLM Style Guide ). So, this is a missing piece of infrastructure not only for users but also for machines.
 * Since enabling this feature does not hinder anyone to work just as before, but not enabling it hinders other users to work optimally, as they always had to find workarounds for it before, I have added the total-pages parameter to CS1/CS2 templates now. When specified, the info is displayed in parentheses following the other page info. As the use of this feature is entirely optional, users, who don't need it, can simply continue to not use it as before, but users, who always wanted to have this facility, can now finally use it through documented means. This will make this encyclopeia more convenient to edit, more consistent in its appearance, more machine-readable, and eventually more reliable to use. Since the total number of pages are automatically also reported as part of the COinS metadata we generate, external parties can take advantage of it as well. In the mid- to long run, this will help to fix an uncountable number of incorrectly stated total numbers of pages in external databases (Google Books and Amazon Marketplace come to my mind immediately). So everyone wins.
 * Examples:
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:06, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't particularly care one way or the other but: Over the years an uncountable number of people have asked for this feature; really? Uncountable?  I'd be very surprised if Google Books and Amazon Marketplace use our metadata when composing their pages about some book.  Seems to me that you are struggling to find an argument that will convince those who oppose inclusion of total-page to switch their position.
 * I think that if we are going to keep this parameter, the supporting code in Module:Citation/CS1/sandbox should be made part of .  I have done that, added error detection, and other cleanup.
 * Further examples:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:11, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, strike "uncountable", set "many". ;-) Over the years there were many people asking for it, giving good arguments.
 * Regarding Goggle and Amazon, what I meant is not that they use our data (at least not directly - although indirectly Google probably does), but that their database entries contain a large number of errors. When I write down references for articles I always try to find an online source for the convenience of the readers. Sometimes I end up at Google Books (not Amazon) and when I compare their info with the publication in my hands I very often find their info to be incorrect in some ways (after verifying that we are actually talking about the same edition), the total number of pages is wrong in probably 20–30% of the cases. I don't know where they derive their data from, but it can't be only from manual entry during scanning. Sometimes the entries seem to be the result of mixing up several different editions of a work. So, even if Google would not be among those who harvest our data directly, providing accurate info will help other parties which do harvest us, and through data exchanges/comparisons/synchronizations, this will in the long term help to reduce the amount of errors everywhere.
 * Regarding the new error checking, thanks for adding this (this would have been on my list as well in one of the next few iterations).
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:55, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm surprised that you added this in the middle of a discussion in which people were disagreeing with you. Please revert. Kanguole 23:28, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * A big improvement. Now when I am translating a French page and hit |passage=132|pages totales=269 I do not have to drop information. Great! A useful step towards supporting meaningful bibliographies. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:31, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * We are here to find and implement solutions to solve problems, not to keep problems unresolved forever. If you don't need a feature, simply don't use it. Other people have a use for the feature and are adding (and were always adding) total page info anyway when they found it appropriate to include it in the entry - it is just that they had to append it at the end of the citation so that it did not show up alongside the other page info where some style guides recommend to put it and that they had to invent their own nomenclature. This caused an inconsistent look and made the entries more difficult to maintain (like Green pointed out). Now, they can do it in a structured and consistent way. Makes it easier to handle for everyone, humans and machines. Fewer errors, and easier to correct.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:55, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * There is absolutely no demonstrated consensus for the addition of total-pages. This must be reverted. The rationale behind your argument is flawed and the opinions expressed debatable. This is a disruptive edit in the middle of a discussion. 64.18.9.196 (talk) 02:53, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * This change isn't live, just in a sandbox. Nthep (talk) 08:22, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Yep.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:55, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If there is anything that is disruptive, it is the totally inappropriate drama board tone you use. What is also disruptive to the process and project is to try to hinder constructive and productive editors to work more efficiently out of some strange dogmatics. It boils down to WP:DONTLIKEIT. See problems from multiple perspectives and think solution-oriented (solutions to solve everyone's needs, not only your own ones) and not ideologically.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:55, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * What goes in the sandbox is test cases of what is decided here. Not your notions of what should be. They don't belong in the modules' sandboxes. As has been pointed out many times this parameter has nothing to do with discovering sources in order to verify wikitext. The ideology here is coming from you, consistently. Instead of making of citations something they are not try fixing the existing problems. Polluting the sandbox with whatever fancy notion or non-applicable request anyone comes up with is hardly constructive. 64.18.9.197 (talk) 12:04, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * What benefit is provided in a reference telling the reader it is page 437 out of 1131? Absolutely none that I can envisage? The only possible use is in a bibliography where there are no page or page ranges mentioned and even then I am dubious that there is any real benefit. Neither do I accept the metadata argument for the same reasons given by Trappist. I'm not here to build a machine-readable work but a human-readable one. Nthep (talk) 08:22, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * In the book example, as a reader, the total page number tells me that this is a substantial work on the topic which might be worth obtaining, and it will also give me a first clue on its weight and consequently the shipping costs which would be significant, for example, when you have to import the book because it is a foreign language work. In a bibliography the entry would typically not carry an individual page number cited but just the total number of pages, because this is information given quite regularly in a bibliographical list. As our citation templates are designed to be used for referencing just as well as for bibliographical lists, it is desirable for editors who want to add this info to be able to do so in a well-defined way instead of having to resort to workarounds - why should they?
 * In the journal example, the total page info is somewhat redundant with the page range info, but as has been pointed out, some databases only list the first (and the last) page, not the actually covered pages (often enough, the last page is not even given, so a database entry might appear to be for a single-page article whereas it actually covers multiple pages), and so, when an article is spread over multiple pages, the total number of pages might be smaller than the difference between the start and end pages. This is particularly common in magazines and newspapers with advertisments, not so much in actual journals, so perhaps I should have given a magazine example rather than a journal example. So, the entry can be helpful to verify the other page info entries (see Green's comment above). Just like in the book case, it will also help to quickly estimate if an article is substantial or just a short note. This may help in deciding if it is worth to obtain the article from a library and the costs involved for copying, shipping and handling. Libraries can be quite expensive and charge on a per-page-basis, so this is important info to know. Sure, if the other page info is complete (including the end page) and accurate, the number of total pages can be derived from there as well, but, as said, often enough it is not, and if the pages entry is, i.e. 23–24, 27, 29, 30–35, 37, 39, 41–43, 60 (real example from a magazine article) it is easier for the reader to get it from something like 18.
 * You wrote I'm not here to build a machine-readable work but a human-readable one That's fine. You do not need to be here to build a machine-readable work, and nobody is hindering you to continue to focus on humans only, if you want to. However, others are here to make our contents available to anyone, and for me, this also includes machines (although not primarily). Wikipedia is part of the emerging semantic web. And that's not for the purpose of itself, but for the convenience of the readers as well as the users of the information elsewhere. There are lots of services by third-parties which are basically fed by data from Wikipedia. We don't target them primarily, but anything that serves them (and does not go into our own ways of doing things) will indirectly help us as well as consumers of these services and as researchers and writers of other articles. Total number of pages alone don't matter, but COinS as a whole does, and the more complete and accurate the info, the better.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:55, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry but the first reason is complete rubbish, citations are not there to help work out shipping costs and/or copying costs but to verify content, period.
 * You want to make things more machine friendly then again that's fine but I'd suggest that those efforts ought to be concentrated in places like Wikidata where you can add all the machine relevant data you want without it having to become more visual bloat for human readers. Also putting information into Wikidata might aid editors like Aymatth2 as they won't have to translate citation information just pull in the bits they want from Wikidata.
 * I'd be prepared to compromise on total pages being in but only if the style guide is that they are only used in bibliography lists and not in citations but first preference would be to move it all to Wikidata. Nthep (talk) 11:40, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that is a reasonable compromise, assuming use of total pages applies both to bibliographies of the subject's works, where it is important, and to bibliographies of works cited by or relevant to the article, where it is interesting. It is good to have attributes like this in Wikidata, but challenging to most editors to get it there. The most practical way is for the editor to put it in a structured template in Wikipedia, then have a bot migrate it. The French seem ahead of us on use of Wikidata. I am starting to see infoboxes that just display Wikidata attributes, e.g. Honoré Bouche (click on "Modifier le code"). Aymatth2 (talk) 13:20, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I'll be clear about what I think is acceptable use of total pages - a list of works by the subject, whether that is an article in itself or a section of an article about the author.
 * Not acceptable - any work used to reference the article or in a further reading section. So anything that goes in  tags or is in a sources section where an article uses sfn or any other referencing system is not to use total number of pages, nor is it a way to get round this by not citing a work but listing it as further reading.
 * But I repeat, moving as much details about books, journals, webpages etc to Wikidata and pulling the information from there is much more preferable to having amounts of bloat in Wikipedia. Migrating existing data to Wikidata is fine, adding more into Wikipedia to export it to Wikidata is not ok. Nthep (talk) 16:48, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * (edit-conflict) Nthep, regarding your without it having to become more visual bloat for human readers. I wonder where you see the visual bloating. I mean, it is not that this info wasn't present in articles so far and would now suddenly start to appear. Editors have always been adding total page info to (some) citations and (some more) bibliographic entries where they found it appropriate, and that is perfectly okay per CITEVAR. I consider it more visually displeasing (and also inconvenient) having to append the info at the end of a citation template and seeing this information formatted variously because each editor chooses his/her own styling then to have it included where some style guides recommend to put it, that is, alongside the other page info, and before the identifiers. However, the exact place is certainly debatable, the point is that if the info is included it should be formatted consistently.
 * I don't expect editors now suddenly starting to add the info all over the place, if that is what you are afraid of, it's just that they now can do what they always did in a structured way without having to worry about how to style it (that's one of the very purposes of templates).
 * Like you I think that it will be mostly used in bibliographic entries and only occasionally in citations, just like before. So, there is at least some agreement there. But the details of what is appropriate in a particular context is to be discussed, if necessary, by the individual contributors and article editors, not by us. We just provide the tools to enable our editors to work more efficiently and produce more consistent output more reliably. I could understand some concerns when we would be changing the syntax and some users would have to change their long-trained habits just because of a new feature they personally don't need or understand, but in this case nothing changes for them. They can simply ignore it. Occasionally they will see the total page info in articles, but that's not different from the situation now - they always saw them, just in free style notation. So, this really should be a non-issue and no-brainer. If we don't add it, the next good faith editor will come around and ask for it in a couple of months, like they did for years. The fix to the issue is to finally address it, not to ignore it (or the editors asking for it).
 * There is obviously a reason, why people come here asking for it, there is a reason, why it's recommended in some style guides, and why it is part of COinS, and Wikidata, and is supported by citation templates in other Wikipedias. They can't be all wrong. Smart people try to learn from other people's experiences and habits.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:30, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Which style guides recommend it? Kanguole 16:49, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * For your convenience here are some examples:
 * NLM (for books, conferences, technical and scientific reports, dissertations, theses, bibliographies, maps, web, media)
 * AMS (for books, theses, reports, memos, notes)
 * NCBI (for some)
 * IWC (for books, chapters, articles, reports)
 * KNE (for books, conferences, reports, dissertations, theses)
 * CSE (for journal articles)
 * AR (for books, conferences, bulletins, theses)
 * UVLF (for books, conferences)
 * I have also personally seen this style studying the references and bibliography sections of French, Russian, Polish, Czech and German publications, including some older books. Reportedly, this style is particularly common in France.
 * There are many more, but this quickly collected list should already prove that this is a real-world issue and that these requests emerge from actual use cases (not something someone made up as some inhere appear to believe just because they haven't seen it personally - there is a world outside the bubble... ;-)
 * See also:
 * https://books.google.com/books?id=PXJHAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA114&lpg=PA114
 * https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/41330/specific-page-and-total-number-of-pages
 * https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/443870/how-to-add-total-number-of-pages-on-a-book-reference-with-natbib
 * https://liinwww.ira.uka.de/csbib/Misc/beebe
 * http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/master.bib
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:35, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think there are editors who will start to add it all over the place, simply because the parameter is there. Populating it with what though? Yes, there are going to be conscientious editors who will go from physical copies or good online libraries containing accurate reproductions of documents but there are others who won't and will use figures taken from Google books, Amazon marketplace - which you appear to admit are not entirely accurate. Then we're not improving any quality just reinforcing the status quo. Smart people try to learn from other people's experiences and habits - yes they do, but sometimes the answer is to question back "what benefit do you think this adds to Wikipedia?" and that's what I'm doing. I've not seen any argument that either convinces me that it is necessary or beneficial (just because we could doesn't mean we have to or should do) nor convinces me that it won't be misused.  I can see a very limited use case but I still think that it is of negligible benefit to (the quality of) Wikipedia but one I am prepared to compromise on if those pushing for it to be included recognise that others have concerns about it's use and that these need to be discussed - not on an article by article case - but more generally about where total pages is appropriate or not. Nthep (talk) 17:17, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Even if there is irrationality in Wikipedia (including in this thread ;-) I ultimately believe in the conscientiousness of the majority of our contributing editors (otherwise this whole project would have long collapsed rather than emerged into the quite impressive although still imperfect form it has found already). So, if someone would "abuse" the feature, they would be corrected. Ultimately, the decision to include or not include the information is up to the editor working on the article, just as it is now already (hence the need to potentially talk it out on the article talk pages in case of disagreements). We can't dictate anything here, but what I think might be useful to add to the documentation of this feature is an appeal that editors should use their "common sense" in applying it and not use unreliable sources.
 * All in all, I think, this feature will help to reduce errors in Wikipedia, not increase them. For one, because it would keep people from abusing the page and pages parameters for the count of pages (Green reported this as a common problem, I have seen it as well many times, and even two participants of this thread (one supporter and one opposer) admitted that they abused the page parameter for this - this will create incorrect metadata (COinS ), so the error is carried on. Switching to total-pages would not only eliminate the distribution of incorrect metadata, but even start to add the correct metadata . Secondly, it will also help to find other incorrect usages of the page/ pages parameters, which are quite common, where, for articles spanning over multiple pages, only the start page is given and people assume the publication to be a one-pager, or only the lowest and highest page, rather than the actual range, which might be non-continuous. All this will improve the reliability of our information and not only help third-parties, but directly help our readership, i.e. as it will reduce the number of incorrect library orders based on our pagination data.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:11, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * There are many more, but this quickly collected list should already prove that this is a real-world issue and that these requests emerge from actual use cases (not something someone made up as some inhere appear to believe just because they haven't seen it personally - there is a world outside the bubble... ;-)
 * See also:
 * https://books.google.com/books?id=PXJHAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA114&lpg=PA114
 * https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/41330/specific-page-and-total-number-of-pages
 * https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/443870/how-to-add-total-number-of-pages-on-a-book-reference-with-natbib
 * https://liinwww.ira.uka.de/csbib/Misc/beebe
 * http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/master.bib
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:35, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I think there are editors who will start to add it all over the place, simply because the parameter is there. Populating it with what though? Yes, there are going to be conscientious editors who will go from physical copies or good online libraries containing accurate reproductions of documents but there are others who won't and will use figures taken from Google books, Amazon marketplace - which you appear to admit are not entirely accurate. Then we're not improving any quality just reinforcing the status quo. Smart people try to learn from other people's experiences and habits - yes they do, but sometimes the answer is to question back "what benefit do you think this adds to Wikipedia?" and that's what I'm doing. I've not seen any argument that either convinces me that it is necessary or beneficial (just because we could doesn't mean we have to or should do) nor convinces me that it won't be misused.  I can see a very limited use case but I still think that it is of negligible benefit to (the quality of) Wikipedia but one I am prepared to compromise on if those pushing for it to be included recognise that others have concerns about it's use and that these need to be discussed - not on an article by article case - but more generally about where total pages is appropriate or not. Nthep (talk) 17:17, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Even if there is irrationality in Wikipedia (including in this thread ;-) I ultimately believe in the conscientiousness of the majority of our contributing editors (otherwise this whole project would have long collapsed rather than emerged into the quite impressive although still imperfect form it has found already). So, if someone would "abuse" the feature, they would be corrected. Ultimately, the decision to include or not include the information is up to the editor working on the article, just as it is now already (hence the need to potentially talk it out on the article talk pages in case of disagreements). We can't dictate anything here, but what I think might be useful to add to the documentation of this feature is an appeal that editors should use their "common sense" in applying it and not use unreliable sources.
 * All in all, I think, this feature will help to reduce errors in Wikipedia, not increase them. For one, because it would keep people from abusing the page and pages parameters for the count of pages (Green reported this as a common problem, I have seen it as well many times, and even two participants of this thread (one supporter and one opposer) admitted that they abused the page parameter for this - this will create incorrect metadata (COinS ), so the error is carried on. Switching to total-pages would not only eliminate the distribution of incorrect metadata, but even start to add the correct metadata . Secondly, it will also help to find other incorrect usages of the page/ pages parameters, which are quite common, where, for articles spanning over multiple pages, only the start page is given and people assume the publication to be a one-pager, or only the lowest and highest page, rather than the actual range, which might be non-continuous. All this will improve the reliability of our information and not only help third-parties, but directly help our readership, i.e. as it will reduce the number of incorrect library orders based on our pagination data.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:11, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Page, pages, total pages, page range: break
The biggest problem Wikipedia has is its unreliability. Obviously, it will never become reliable, as its contributors are anonymous and of uncertain expertise. But it can become less unreliable, by a focus on publishing articles that are based on fact, or on articles that explicitly present currently accepted opinion as such, with space also given to major counter-opinions. In order to do that articles must be verified. A first step towards that is to base wikitext on easily verifiable (by humans) citations, and then verify these citations as appropriate to the article. In the sprawl of current Wikipedia, not even the first step of the first step is anywhere close to conclusion. Instead, add-ons such as Wikidata take precious development resources. What this does, is proliferate unreliability. Because the base data is unreliable. Treating citations as bibliograhic entries unfocusses development from the essentials and adds complexity. This thread and others are proof. Citation templates are there for citations easily readable and verifiable by humans and not software, a necessary and urgent requirement. They are not there for whatever one thinks they can cram into them. The total pages info does not belong in a citation. This is a massive waste of time. 65.88.88.46 (talk) 15:10, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I have started many articles about authors, always include a bibliography (usually called "Works" or "Publications" to avoid confusion with the article bibliography), use the citation template for the entries and show the number of pages or journal page range where available. But the format is awkward:




 * This is not a reference to page 1089, but an attempt to show that the book has 1089 pages. If total-pages were available I would use it, and the bibliography entry would be clearer. Are there in fact 1089 pages in this book? I think there are, but perhaps the source is wrong. The only way to eliminate all errors from Wikipedia is to eliminate all articles. Making it easier to format information does not make errors more or less likely. Some books are cited by several articles. If the metadata for such a book were held in Wikidata and reflected mechanically in Wikipedia articles it could be verified once. The articles that cite it would all show the same verified metadata. Aymatth2 (talk) 17:57, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * None of the above is disputed. Here's where the dispute lies:
 * The citation system is used for citations. If it is used for anything else, including bibliographies, it is beyond the system's scope and concerns. Use it for biblio entries if you must; I have done so. But I don't come here with requests for unsupported use. I have to live with what is around, until proper inline biblio forms (ie not infoboxes) are available. I use yes and nnn pp..
 * Yes, in theory Wikidata is going to be a good thing. Sometime. In the meantime, garbage in/garbage out. If the original book information (including any citation) is unverified and unreliable, so is Wikidata. It is also magnifying the unreliability through reuse, making things worse.
 * 104.247.55.106 (talk) 18:32, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * If an article uses sfn to point to source definitions at the back formatted by citation, that is long-established practice, good practice when several different pages are being cited from one source. The list of sources is a bibliography and the citation entries are bibliography entries. They do not give page numbers – those belongs in the sfn entries – but they describe the source, and could give total pages or page range if known. We have a standard template for formatting information about books, papers, periodical articles etc., and it is called citation. We do not need a another template for articles that use sfn and a third for lists of works by the subject of the article. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:38, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * We are going in circles, I believe. Is it understood that Wikipedia is a novel project that cannot be compared with established practice of any sort? There has simply never been a similar project of anonymous, unvetted contributors serving the general public. What would suffice in a professionally edited work by an approved/vetted known author geared to a particular demographic is inadequate here. Is it so hard to understand that a novel project may require novel thinking? Here, everything must be proven. The citation system that helps bring this about must be efficient, clear and easily understood. Topical citations with sources not known to be unreliable, and the fastest, easiest way to apply them for verifiability. The issue is not or the full citation templates. Needed are correct sources (that is the so-called "work" patameter) and a fast, easy way to locate them (that is all the other citation parameters that point in some way or other to the work's location). "Total pages" does not contribute to that. 64.18.9.197 (talk) 22:17, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Most Wikipedia users find articles to be well-written, useful and accurate, because the articles most users look for are carefully edited. At the other extreme, there is a mass of articles that start off with "The village headman is the most Honorable Amrit Singh who has selflessly conferred many great benefits..." Only those who think covid vaccines contain tracking chips pay any attention to these ones. In between there is a wide band of articles on more or less obscure subjects that are often useful and sometimes excellent, although they may rely on sources that are not entirely accurate. Even the most pompous academic papers often contain errors. We will never achieve perfect accuracy. But we should make it easy for editors who are concerned about quality in citations and bibliographies to record relevant data about sources in consistent format using standard templates. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:41, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The audience of an encyclopedia are its readers, not its editors. It should be made easy for readers to verify whatever nonsense editors write. It is nonsense until verified. That is only the first step. But it is absolutely necessary because the next steps depend on it. Also, several fictional items were mentioned: how would "most users" know that articles are "accurate"? They are not "useful" otherwise. And if they are "well-written", unless verified, they are well-presented garbage. How can anyone tell that the articles "most users look for are carefully edited"? And how can an article be "useful" and "sometimes excellent" if they depend on sources that "are not entirely accurate"? One could surmise that such vague, unproven, and self-contradictory language comes from people who insist (absent any proof) that vaccines contain tracking chips. Another fictional item above is the notion that citations are about achieving accuracy. They are not. They are about providing the most efficient, clear way to verify claims made in wikitext. Citations are agnostic otherwise. A citation from a source not known as unreliable that verifies wikitext is a good citation no matter if the claim it verifies is later proved inaccurate or biased. These concern further steps in verification, beyond the purview of citations. But they cannot happen unless first, the citations are there. And it is easy to see, by randomly picking any Wikipedia article, that proper citations are a very distinct, small minority. But it gets worse. For a time I was reading designated so-called "good articles". I was not surprized to find they were often poorly cited and badly edited, using language that should have been flagged as non-neutral. 64.18.9.199 (talk) 03:30, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It is hard to know what sources to trust. Maybe the vaccine is indeed full of chips. I think I saw something on Twitter about that. Let's hope the new |total-pages parameter helps clear up the confusion. Aymatth2 (talk) 22:00, 28 September 2021 (UTC)

Citation++
One possibility would be to repurpose the deprecated source template for use in bibliographies. It could wrap citation, then add a few descriptive elements to the end: |total_pages= |page_range= |folio= |binding= etc. It would refer to citation for description of all the other parameters. It would give a sort of escape valve for those who prefer more complete bibliographical information without adding complexity to the citation templates. Just possibly, some obscure parameters from those templates could be migrated to the new source. Aymatth2 (talk) 18:20, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Journal template & sic
I raised this in a Phabricator task however it was basically closed as "functions as designed" and I was pointed here. Would be interested in hearing any comment. Within a CS1 template if a  template (with 'nolink' option used) is attempted within the text within the journal parameter then an error is produced indicating that Italic or bold markup not allowed..... If a template is used instead then this is accepted and does not produce the error.

An example can be found here. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiway_number_partitioning&diff=prev&oldid=1048226979

What happens?: Note the reference to 'markup not allowed'.

''Walsh, Toby (2009-07-11). "Where are the really hard manipulation problems? the phase transition in manipulating the veto rule". Proceedings of the 21st International Jont [sic] Conference on Artifical [sic] Intelligence. IJCAI'09. Pasadena, California, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.: 324–329. Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |journal= (help)''

What should have happened instead?: I would have expected that the following would be valid syntax.

I can't say that I have tested other citation styles however there are others such as where the sic template seems to work fine. If this is regarded as FAD and no intention to fix then the documentation requires updating. Happy to do that. - Neils51 (talk) 03:07, 5 October 2021 (UTC)


 * I doubt this is a FAD item. This is a bug. sic is a necessary utility template that can indirectly affect verification, even when it is understood that citation elements are presented verbatim. I did not look at the code to see exactly why this returns an error in journal but not in other  templates. But there are several issues with the module code, so it is not surprising. The bottom line is, this should be fixed. Citation-wise this is not frivolous. All such templates should be compatible. 71.247.146.98 (talk) 11:47, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This does not depend on the template, but happens with any CS1/CS2 citation template, if you put italic markup in one of the parameters for periodicals (journal, magazine, newspaper, periodical, website, work). sic does that, not a typo doesn't. The obvious fix would be to correct the two typos in the name of the periodical. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 13:20, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * They are not typos. That is the function of the sic template, to make that obvious. This is a bug of the module that should be fixed, and very easily. The bug is based on bad module design. The citation modules should not return errors unrelated to citations. This is very easy to implement. These "errors" and their discussion belong to the COinS pages, not here. As it is now, it can be argued that they indirectly impede verification by limiting legitimate editor choice and making citations less exacting. 64.18.9.201 (talk) 13:39, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * One really does have to wonder about the quality of a source when the publisher can't be bothered to spell-check the title of its offering. And why are you using  to cite conference proceedings?  We have  for that.
 * Did you not see it? Right at the top of the  template documentation is a message box that has this image: Stop hand nuvola.svg.  That message box is there because  produces output that is not suitable for inclusion in cs1|2 citation metadata.  Instead, avoid the issue entirely: perhaps use  or  to mark the spelling errors and prevent auto-spelling correctors from fixing the misspellings and to produce correct metadata:
 * Proceedings of the 21st International [Jo Conference on [Arti Intelligence
 * Or, silently fix the spelling because it is pretty obvious that joint and artificial are the intended words ...
 * And why does italicize its output?  The brackets aren't sufficient to set it apart from the rest of the text?  As a loanword, per MOS:FOREIGN, sic should not be italicized (italicized here because MOS:WORDSASWORDS) – I find it in my 1974 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary which satisfies the rule-of-thumb for loanwords.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:07, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This is an obvious typographical error that should be silently corrected, per MOS:CONFORMTITLE and MOS:SIC. If you as an editor insists on shaming the publisher by reproducing the typo, that editor should use not a typo. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:35, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Are you responding to me?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:04, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * No, of course not. Sorry for being unclear. Personal pronoun struck. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:09, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This is a case of misapplied pedantry. Firstly, cite conference is the appropriate template, as the cited material is conference proceedings, not a journal. Secondly, the name of the conference is not "21st International Jont Conference on Artifical Intelligence", it is "21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence". The typos are not in the name of the work, they are in ACM's digital library referring to (see use-mention distinction) the conference proceedings. So the appropriate place for sic would be in some putative body text, "ACM's digital library refers to IJCAI'09: Proceedings of the 21st international jont [sic] conference on Artifical [sic] intelligence ...", not the cite.
 * The citation used in the article is just ACM's abstract. Why not go to the source and get the actual paper for free, not just an abstract?:
 * &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 14:45, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The paper is part of the proceedings and as such, its title in the template should not be italicized. The proceedings title should be italicized and since it is nominally the same as the title of the conference, conference is not necessary.  So:
 * I used article here because there isn't a paper parameter (probably should be ...).
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:04, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * And nothing of the above has to do with the fact that the usage of sic is not an error and should not be flagged as such, regardless of the citation template, and also regardless of how outputs. The COinS notice at the  page is irrelevant. Instead of forcing human editors to comply with limitations of software that has nothing to do with citing sources, the offending software should be fixed. All else is obfuscation, and as far as citations are concerned, a bug. 65.88.88.126 (talk) 15:26, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Not a bug. outputs HTML character entities. That is not allowed in COinS-generating fields. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 15:54, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * (edit-conflict) You are correct that this is not a bug. But since, I think, there is still something we could, possibly, improve in our template's behaviour, I'd like to point out that what triggers the error message here is the italic markup issued by sic, not the HTML character entities. The reason for why the template does not allow italic markup here is because this is typically an attempt to override the citation styling applied by the template itself (and one of the very purposes of these templates is to take the burden of styling away from editors and let the template do this work for them).
 * It could be argued, however, that matching pairs of italics in the middle of the parameter value might be "other markup" that should be accepted by the template. However, this would raise the question how to render it when the template applies italicization by itself as well. At present, the template removes italics and boldface from the parameter value before applying its own italicization.
 * Given that, applying italics (directly or through sic) in the parameter value would not cause any COinS problems - it's automatically stripped off...
 * What is a bit ironic here is the fact that the HTML entities, which are also produced by sic, can, while not causing the template to throw an error message, cause some mild issues for COinS consumers (so the red warning sign at sic's documentation page is still appropriate), because what is transmitted as metadata could be considered to be overencoded:
 * for
 * which will be correctly displayed by a HTML engine at the receiver's end as:
 * It would be better if we would carry out this decoding of HTML entities into Unicode before we make it part of the metadata, so that, percent-encoded, we would just transmit:
 * and the receiver could read the data as plain text and would not have to use a HTML engine to decode it. Also, we could (almost) consider sic to be a CS1/CS2-compatible template then, which, although not necessary in this specific example case, would still be an improvement in the general case.
 * Almost, because the template would still complain about the italics markup created by sic. Since the citation template sees the output of templates like sic rather than the template itself, the only direct fix for this would be to allow italics markup in the middle of parameter values which would not accept it when applied to the value as a whole. Another possible solution could be to make templates such as sic "visible" to CS1/CS2 through a tricky variant of the "template internal metadata" scheme proposed in another thread: For this, a template like sic would emit some special kind of invisible metadata, but not to improve CS1/CS2's COinS output but simply to communicate a message like "Hi CS1/CS2, the italics markup you are seeing right now is not user-generated, but was issued by me, sic. You do not need to issue an error message for it, my output is known to be CS1/CS2-compatible." Perhaps this sounds complicated, but implementation-wise it could be a simple  setting an invisible flag. CS1/CS2 would just strip off the span, when present, and take advantage of the hidden information provided by subordinate helper templates like sic to improve its own behaviour.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:21, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Of course, this would not work in cases where the real parameter value would actually contain HTML entities like a hypothetical title "Study on HTML entities like &amp;szlig; in citation templates", which the template would then interpret as "Study on HTML entities like ß in citation templates" instead of leaving it as it is. The question is how likely it is for parameter values to mean HTML entities verbatim rather than them being the result of some (unnecessary or deliberate escape-)encoding earlier down the chain. In parameter fields like those for periodicals (as in the OP's example here) I think it is extremely unlikely that a HTML entity string would be meant as plain text rather than as the character it encodes, whereas in a title field there is a higher possibility that it might occur as text, although still rarely. So, if we'd implement this "HTML entity decoding before percent-encoding", the HTML decoding should probably depend on the actual parameter the HTML entity was found in or be disabled when ((accept-this-as-it-is)) syntax is used as well. If we would want to improve the compatibility with specific templates (like sic) only it would also be possible to try and change them to not issue HTML entities in the first place. This might not be possible for all such templates, but in the specific case of sic it seems as if it could just issue  instead of  . This would not be an improvement for the general case, though.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 09:55, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * While this does not improve the general case, I have meanwhile modified sic so that it no longer emits any HTML entities (except for, newly,  which CS1/CS2 converts into a normal space internally, so it doesn't show up as a HTML entity in the metadata). Since CS1/CS2 also strips off italics  and boldface, sic could now be considered COinS-safe.
 * However, CS1/CS2 doesn't "know" that and (unnecessarily) still throws an error for the italics issued by sic. Unless we would want to allow matching pairs of italics markup in the middle of parameter values which do not allow italics markup for the value as a whole, there is no way for CS1/CS2 to detect this, as it does not "see" sic, only its output. To illustrate my "communication through metadata" proposal I have changed sic's sandbox so that it issues an invisible metadata span:
 * containing the special token "safe-italics" which would tell CS1/CS2 that these particular italics are okay to accept and that it should not issue the error message. If we would enhance CS1/CS2 to look for this and strip off the span when found before further processing, sic could be made fully compatible with CS1/CS2.
 * In this particular case, we do not need to issue alternative metadata text, hence the metadata text that was following the " " in the other examples above is empty. In other cases, we may need to support a number of other tokens (TBD), so the "MeTaDaTa" string could accept a list of optional tokens in addition to the actual metadata. The general syntax could be something like:
 * IIRC, % was not an allowed character in a class name in HTML4, so if we would still have to support HTML4, we would have to replace all % in the percent-encoded metadata by one of the (few) allowed chars (not used for other purposes already). On the other hand, if we can assume HTML5, this precaution would not be necessary and we could further improve the token syntax (i.e. to become K/V pairs, look nicer and be easier to parse). TBD.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:37, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I've never come across that. AFAIK in both HTML 4 and HTML5, the only character that can't be used in a class name is the space, because it's the separator in a list of class names (e.g.  is two classes, not one). Some other characters shouldn't be used in class names because they may have special meaning elsewhere - for example, if you want to use a class name in the selector of a CSS rule, that class name shouldn't use characters that have special meaning in selectors, and percent is [//www.w3.org/TR/selectors-3/#selectors not among those]. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:00, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Red, for your feedback. I, too, haven't run into this in practice, but in HTML 4, the allowed characters in a class name were still severely limited at least in the spec (letters, digits, "-", "_", ":", "." per ) whereas in HTML 5 there are almost no restrictions any more. There are still limitations for CSS, but they won't affect us. Would there be restrictions in conjunction with JavaScript (not a use case at present either, but could be one in the future)? Still, the main question is if we need to worry about HTML 4 at all or can just assume that the browser will support HTML 5.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:41, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that you are reading the entry for ID and NAME tokens as if it is a continuation of the entry for CDATA. It's separate. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:45, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Am I? Now I'm confused. ;-) Basically I read:
 * "ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".")"
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:15, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, I thought as much. That's the part relevant to the  and   attributes, not the   attribute, for which only the CDATA bullet is relevant. See [//www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2 section 7.5.2]. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:33, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Now I want to try defining some class names that include character entities! ;-) isaacl (talk) 23:03, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * COinS-generating fields should adjust their behavior to the requirements of human editors, and not the other way around. provides a common way of flagging significant information (apparent but not actual editor typos), used in citation systems from way before software metadata was even a concept. If the facility (the template ) exists but it does not work, it is a bug as far as citations are concerned. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 19:30, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Then since CS1/2 templates generate COinS metadata, and COinS data fields can't take HTML markup, and the base requirement seems to be able to use arbitrary templates you want in citations, the conclusion is to not use or  templates, and manually format citation data. Those templates are not required to be used. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 20:00, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It doesn't follow. A more obvious solution is not to use COinS, since it generates false citation errors. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 20:27, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * You can choose not to use COinS by not using CS1/2 templates. Meanwhile, I hope that CS1/2 templates continue to support (and improve their support for) COinS. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 22:10, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:41, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that you are reading the entry for ID and NAME tokens as if it is a continuation of the entry for CDATA. It's separate. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:45, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Am I? Now I'm confused. ;-) Basically I read:
 * "ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".")"
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:15, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, I thought as much. That's the part relevant to the  and   attributes, not the   attribute, for which only the CDATA bullet is relevant. See [//www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.2 section 7.5.2]. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:33, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Now I want to try defining some class names that include character entities! ;-) isaacl (talk) 23:03, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * COinS-generating fields should adjust their behavior to the requirements of human editors, and not the other way around. provides a common way of flagging significant information (apparent but not actual editor typos), used in citation systems from way before software metadata was even a concept. If the facility (the template ) exists but it does not work, it is a bug as far as citations are concerned. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 19:30, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Then since CS1/2 templates generate COinS metadata, and COinS data fields can't take HTML markup, and the base requirement seems to be able to use arbitrary templates you want in citations, the conclusion is to not use or  templates, and manually format citation data. Those templates are not required to be used. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 20:00, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It doesn't follow. A more obvious solution is not to use COinS, since it generates false citation errors. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 20:27, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * You can choose not to use COinS by not using CS1/2 templates. Meanwhile, I hope that CS1/2 templates continue to support (and improve their support for) COinS. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 22:10, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

I don't think this is how it works at all. Citation modules & templates are there to support citations in order to apply Wikipedia policy. They don't exist to support COinS or any other scheme. Artificially limiting editors of citations because some foreign code has problems is contrary to both spirit and letter of policy. The citation system has enough issues of itself. It certainly does not need the additional problems brought on by external code. 68.173.76.118 (talk) 00:46, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * What external code are you talking about? All that COinS is is a metadata format encoded as an attribute to an HTML tag. CS1/2 templates generate COinS metadata based on the content of certain fields. That's it. There's no external code. Wikipedia is probably the largest generator of COinS metadata for citations on the web. External sites and projects are COinS consumers of WP's data. Wikipedia has chosen to take on the responsibility of producing machine-readable citation data, and it only makes sense to support it when CS1/2 citation data is already declared as sets of key-value pairs. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 02:09, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Of course there is external code, the metadata format add-on. Which is fine, as long as it doesn't interfere with the data itself. And here, there is interference. It is not right for the data to be secondary to metadata. Secondly, the responsibility of Wikipedia is to its human readers. The policies afaik are designed with that audience in mind. Machine readers are secondary. That is the platform. If the metadata scheme cannot keep up with these fundamental items it should be either fixed, replaced, or discarded. It's not as if Wikipedia is a restricted property. All native data can be easily accessed. The main thing is, program for humans (non-expert humans) first. I suggest devising a better scheme that follows these priorities. In the meantime, all COinS -generated "errors" should be removed from the CS1/2 UI. We can't wait forever. The status quo is an excuse to never fix what should be fixed. 64.18.9.197 (talk) 11:49, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Hmm. That's really confusing, just reading cite conference/doc: title: Title of source. .... What you say also appears to contradict the Example case in the docs.
 * article isn't listed in the "Full parameter set in vertical format" list in Usage just before Examples. Also, would book-title be the title of the published proceedings? book-title: The title of the published version of the conference proceedings, written in full. May be wikilinked. Formatted in italics. (Not to be confused with conference, below.)
 * I guess there's 2 ways to use cite conference: 1. Citing a paper submitted for the conference. I assume this is what's most commonly used. 2. Citing the proceedings itself, as a work. When editing, I generally assume title in any template is the title of the work I'm referring to, and I don't care if the title is italicized, quoted, etc. (because the choice of cite template does that for me). So from a principle of least surprise, I would expect to use title for this citation (unless, of course, my assumption that use case 1. is not the most commonly-used one).
 * If possible, I propose that title be quoted, not italicized, if book-title (or perhaps better named, proceedings-title) is also defined. Otherwise, if only one is given, italicize title. Is that reasonable? &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 15:38, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * That would make it mirror cite encyclopedia's behavior, I guess. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 15:46, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * For a long time I have been saying that we ought to rewrite . Maybe someday we will.  In the normal case I wouldn't have rewritten your citation as I did except that you included a link to the proceedings and book-title doesn't have a matching url parameter.
 * When I use I tend to avoid title and use entry and encyclopedia.  I can imagine something similar for  (which perhaps should be ) so prceedings and paper.  conference should go away.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 22:34, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Is book-title where booktitle went??! I remembered that booktitle used to work and at some point stopped working, but didn't remember why. This constant churn in parameter names needs to stop. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, it was deprecated and replaced entirely early in 2021. Unhyphenated multi-word parameters were on their way to complete elimination as part of a multi-year project, and then a small group of loud editors showed up with pitchforks. I think there are six left, out of an original population of dozens of different unhyphenated multi-word parameters and about 300 total parameters. Maybe someday there will be consistency in CS1 parameter naming, but probably not soon. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:18, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Is book-title where booktitle went??! I remembered that booktitle used to work and at some point stopped working, but didn't remember why. This constant churn in parameter names needs to stop. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, it was deprecated and replaced entirely early in 2021. Unhyphenated multi-word parameters were on their way to complete elimination as part of a multi-year project, and then a small group of loud editors showed up with pitchforks. I think there are six left, out of an original population of dozens of different unhyphenated multi-word parameters and about 300 total parameters. Maybe someday there will be consistency in CS1 parameter naming, but probably not soon. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:18, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

A workaround suggested by Trappist the Monk was

I consider this incorrect. "[Jont]" means that the source wrote something a little different, and the Wikipedia editor saw fit to change it. Such changes are often made when it's necessary to change the capitalization or number of a word at the beginning of a quote.

In this case, "Jont" is what was actually written in the source. If it's necessary to draw attention to the misspelling it should be written "Jont [sic]". If the sic template is misdesigned, why not just write "[sic]". Jc3s5h (talk) 17:43, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The sic template does not seem mis-designed. What is mis-designed is the citation module, which flags errors that have nothing to do with citations. This whole discussion belongs to the COinS pages, not here. As all kinds of inadequate bots and abuse-prone facilities such as AWB and JWB go around "correcting" stuff, it is important for the sic template to be there, since it signals to such software that these are not transcription errors. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 19:36, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * sic is merely a markup template. Nothing more, nothing less. Much like em, mono, math, and hundreds others. The mis-design is in catering to overly simple regex-driven bots to parse both syntax and language. I'm pretty sure bots like MOS Typo Team ignore anything in cites anyways. &emsp;—&#8239;sbb&#8239;(talk) 19:52, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree with Trappist and Jonesey above that this is much ado about nothing. This is the sort of error that should be silently fixed, not proclaimed to the world as an error. We're here to identify references, not to exactly reproduce obvious and minor typographic issues. In this case, the typo isn't even by the conference proceedings publisher (https://www.ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/ lists its name correctly) but in the database of a third party, the ACM digital library. And, as sbb pointed out, the much bigger problem here is the use of the journal citation type for a conference paper. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:01, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, if the typos are not in the original paper but were introduced in ACM's page, we should not be perpetuating that error but going back to the original for the true spellings. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:21, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Disagree, on the general case. This goes contrary to all citation practice. A typo or any other artifact that is not a transcription error has to be presented as is. It should not be arbitrarily "fixed" for any reason, least of all to comply with inadequacies in programming. What can/should be done so as not to confuse citation readers (and secondarily assorted Wikipedia bots), is to signal the obvious discrepancy. This has been done in citations (and cataloguing) for a very, very long time, using the sic notation in most cases. Also, "fixing" of any field, especially one that is indexed in reference databases, may make the item harder to find. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 20:39, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This opinion should be raised at the talk page for MOS:CONFORMTITLE, not here. In the meantime, I have written to the ACM Library to alert them to the typo so that they can make this issue truly moot. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:29, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It seems that all the references to citations at MOS:CONFORMTITLE presuppose following the limitations of COinS, which is the actual issue here. Once citations are rid of the so-called COinS-generated "errors", MOS:CONFORMTITLE can be edited to remove the erroneous information. 65.88.88.91 (talk) 21:47, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Fair enough regarding the notes about syntax errors caused by templates in COINS. There are a few dozen different types of templates listed at, many of which interfere with export of COINS information. Maybe it is COINS that needs to be fixed somehow. I don't know enough about that system to say anything smarter than that about it, though. Is it CS1's job to fix COINS in some way? I don't know. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:55, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for your input. A good read. And thanks to Trappist the monk for the red warning reminder. I think that I had forgotten about that as usage in  works so well. Interesting points about it being ACMs error as I was sure I had found a PDF from the conference publishers where all the page footers contained the 'jont' error however can no longer locate. The original paper exists elsewhere and is fine. Jonesey95's request to ACM has had immediate results, they have fixed their typos, so the article link item will need a further edit. When I have made requests to Google to fix, say, book titles, I have often received a quick response from a real person acknowledging the request however there is usually a six month wait before actual correction. I think the point made about the level of reference and error needs further discussion. I have often taken the stance that if the original material is correct then it doesn't deserve to be 'besmirched' by a subsequent incorrect reference by a third-party. Perhaps that stance, 'silently fixing' such errors is incorrect. The point made about the ability to search for a catalogued misspelled reference would seem valid. Quite often the refs in error tend to be newspaper based which may reflect the extensive use of OCR. Neils51 (talk) 11:23, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Related edits to the sic template
@User:Matthiaspaul - pls revert your edit @ this template. The nowiki tag you added is messing things up. I have commented at that talk page too. 65.88.88.69 (talk) 19:45, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Can you please give examples where you saw things messing up?
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 19:56, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The other thread would be Template talk:Sic/Archive 1, just in case someone would reply there as well. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:05, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't know if this is the right place to continue this, but the nowiki tag interfered with the processing of optional parameters (now reverted by Izno). 65.88.88.69 (talk) 20:20, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The following would not be processed correctly:
 * 65.88.88.69 (talk) 20:24, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * What is it (please be more specific) that is not processed correctly?
 * abc xyz
 * Can't see anything going wrong in the case above and any of my test cases so far... Perhaps some additional trigger condition? On which page did you see things going wrong?
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 20:52, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Please use Template:Sic/testcases for test cases so that everyone can follow along. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:26, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This template does not need to be edited, there is nothing wrong with it. What needs to be fixed is the metadata scheme. I would direct my energy there, instead of putting out fires whenever a legitimate use conflicts with COinS. Enthusiasm and willingness to tackle issues are commendable, but the execution should match, and solutions should be applied where there are actual problems. This is stated with no sense of criticism. 64.18.9.200 (talk) 23:51, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Please use Template:Sic/testcases for test cases so that everyone can follow along. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:26, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This template does not need to be edited, there is nothing wrong with it. What needs to be fixed is the metadata scheme. I would direct my energy there, instead of putting out fires whenever a legitimate use conflicts with COinS. Enthusiasm and willingness to tackle issues are commendable, but the execution should match, and solutions should be applied where there are actual problems. This is stated with no sense of criticism. 64.18.9.200 (talk) 23:51, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Publisher separates volume/issue numbers from journal name
If a publisher is included in cite journal (as unusual as that may be), it is inserted between the journal name and the volume and issue numbers:

Is this a bug? With the bolded volume number I suppose it's not so confusing, but it seems more confusing if there's no volume number:

In that case, there seems to be little cue that the (123) is an issue number. I would expect this placement...
 * Uthor, A. "Reconsidering gizmos". International Rehashing (123). Springervier.

...but perhaps there's some known problem with that of which I wouldn't know.

—2d37 (talk) 09:05, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Is it a bug? Probably not.  Before its conversion to, the wikitext version of  rendered your example citations as:
 * "Reconsidering gizmos" . International Rehashing 45 (123). Springervier.
 * "Reconsidering gizmos" . International Rehashing (123). Springervier.
 * yes the author is omitted because that version of the template does not understand enumerated parameters
 * The next and subsequent versions of the template used until the conversion to lua.  At the time of the lua conversion, the new lua version of the template was intended to be indistinguishable from the wikitext template and, for your examples, still is:
 * The next and subsequent versions of the template used until the conversion to lua.  At the time of the lua conversion, the new lua version of the template was intended to be indistinguishable from the wikitext template and, for your examples, still is:


 * Was there discussion that determined the placement of publisher in the version?  Don't know.  I suspect that the subject did not come up or if it did, was deemed acceptable because publisher use in  is comparatively rare.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:23, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * A likely answer for the placement of publisher has to do with the edition. This is a guess. Normally the edition info would follow the title, and then the edition's publisher would follow. It is not unusual for works to have editions by different publishers. Then the particulars of the edition (volume etc.). 66.108.237.246 (talk) 11:58, 12 October 2021 (UTC)