MediaWiki talk:Citethispage-content

"Retrieved" date formatting broken: Superfluous linebreaks
Something is wrong here. While the preview on looks fine (except that there are visible " " tags around the "retrieved" date), actually using the "cite this page" functionality (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CiteThisPage?page=Example) leads to the "retrieved" date/datetime appearing on lines of its own, which is probably not intended. (The two BibTeX entries even show broken  formatting.)

-- das-g (talk) 10:05, 2 June 2017 (UTC)


 * I think that the usage of Template:Pre instead of the four spaces for formatting may solve the problem. --Pietrodn · talk with me 13:51, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I fixed that, as it looks rather jarring. I'm not sure why the suddenly behaves like it does. There probably was a small change in the parser while they prepare to switch away from Tidy or something. I've filed a bug report. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:14, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

bibtex version - please add 'contributors'
The bibtex version of citation in MediaWiki:Citethispage-content is inconsistent with the other citation examples. I agree that (in this case), the minority is wrong. "Wikipedia" is not a legal person, and even if there were some effort made to define Wikipedia as a legal person, it's rock-solid Wikipedians' and WMF's legal interpretation that the copyright is that of the authors, i.e. Wikipedians. (WMF is not Wikipedia :).)

So in the two bibtex entries, please change

author = "Wikipedia",

to

author = "Wikipedia contributors",

or

author = {Wikipedia contributors},

or

author = "{Wikipedia contributors}",

This should be uncontroversial, it seems to me. (I admit I haven't really checked what bibtex + LaTeX really prefer in terms of {} vs "" here... It's not the easiest thing to search for with a search engine.)

Regarding the existence of a space in the "family name", there are some authors of scientific articles whose "family name" (or main name) has two words separated by a space, e.g. Charles de Gaulle would be  author = "{{de Gaulle}, C.}"  or  author = "{{de~Gaulle}, C.}"  (or Ch. from a phonetic point of view). Boud (talk) 22:10, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:57, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Add authors?
I've opened up a discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Citing_Wikipedia about citing the first few or the main authors. There's a tool under very recent development (it doesn't seem to be working well yet) mentioned in the discussion. The choice "Wikipedia contributors" responds to my immediate concern (Wikipedia is not the author of any Wikipedia pages - and User:Wikipedia is blocked :)), but I think the possibility of citing the first few or a few prominent authors - as self-identified - should be open to debate. So I'm not proposing any short-term change to the Special: page here. I'm just opening up the debate. (There would be a modest cpu cost to listing the first few authors; there would probably be a heavy cpu cost with the algorithm (javascript implementation) under development that estimates the most active contributors, and any alternative algorithm would presumably add either a cpu or a memory/caching load or both.) Boud (talk) 22:10, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

APA version - please add 'contributors'
There seem to be two errors in the APA example:
 * The table APA style quite clearly gives author attribution, even if it's a "group author", rather than no author attribution at all. But our script excludes the author.
 * The APA style table also puts the title of the page after the year. I'm assuming that APA style is correct, since the only "controversy" on Talk:APA style during the last five years is a single comment to do with nonsexist language, which doesn't concern this discussion. But our script has year (and month day) after the page title.

So I propose replacing

. (2024, July 29). In ...

by

contributors. (2024, July 29). . In ...

in the APA subsection. Boud (talk) 21:45, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:07, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Incorrect bibtex produced: produces author name "contributors, W."
Bibtex format interprets author = "Wikipedia contributors" as one author, with the first name "Wikipedia", and the last name "contributors".

Additional curly brackets help: author = "{{{SITENAME}} contributors}", as they tell bibtex that "Wikipedia contributors" is a single, inseparable, unit. 129.206.61.28 (talk) 14:41, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Fixed BibTeX entry section (additional curly braces to prevent bibtex from mis-interpreting 'Wikipedia' as first name and 'contributors' as last name) - I cannot test if the horrible mediawiki syntax is corrrect with the additional braces:

BibTeX entry
@misc{ wiki:xxx, author = "$($ contributors$)$", title = " --- {}{,} ", year = "2024", url = "", note = "[Online; accessed ]" }

When using the LaTeX package  (  somewhere in the preamble), which tends to give much more nicely formatted web addresses, the following may be preferred: @misc{ wiki:xxx, author = "{ contributors}", title = " --- {}{,} ", year = "2024", howpublished = "\url{}", note = "[Online; accessed ]" }

I also fix the wrong  suggestion. That should go into the howpublished field only. 129.206.61.28 (talk) 12:23, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:49, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 13 February 2019
In the "Wikipedia talk pages" section, I'd like to request that the format be changed from that of an external link to that of an intrawiki link. Since it involves nowiki tags, and the end result is similar, it might be easier to understand this request by looking at the source in edit mode:

Please change


 * Markup:   ( [  this version ] )


 * Result: [ ] ([ this version])

to


 * Markup:   (  this version  )


 * Result: [ ] (this version)

I'd also like to make a correction - currently, the result isn't produced with the markup given. Thus, with both changes, the final result should be:


 * Result: (this version)

Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 00:44, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
 * ✅ (without the extra ) —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 02:11, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
 * thanks for catching that. Sorry --DannyS712 (talk) 02:16, 13 February 2019 (UTC)

Add BibLaTeX citation entry
This is a proposal to add a citation entry for BibLaTeX. While BibLaTeX has backwards compatibility with BibTeX, there is a much more fitting entry for BibLaTeX which provides better styling and language adaptation in the final output. It looks like this (check source for templates/magic words):

@inreference{wiki:xxx, author = {{{SITENAME}} contributors}, title = { }, booktitle = {{{SITENAME}}, }, date = {{{CURRENTYEAR}}-July-}, urldate = { }, url = { } }

One example of how it looks once compiled in English, with the default BibLaTeX style and Biber:


 * Wikipedia contributors. MediaWiki talk:Citethispage-content. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Mar. 26, 2019.  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki_talk:Citethispage-content&oldid= (visited on 03/26/2019).

is for a "work of reference such as an encyclopedia" and  is for "an article in a work of reference". is a required field for  and is the name of the reference.

metarmask (talk) 15:13, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 7 April 2020
Copy from User:Pppery/MediaWiki:citethispage-content (applying Special:Diff/949552933), to remove the transclusion of pre, which is only semi-protected so shouldn't be used in the MediaWiki namespace. * Pppery * it has begun... 04:10, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ — xaosflux  Talk 02:41, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Harvard style
Hello, I suggest to add Harvard style to Special:CiteThisPage Because it is a standard rule for citation and referencing. (Please ping me when you replied) Thanks! ⇒ Aram  Talk  11:10, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 21 January 2021
Replace two occurrences wiki:xxx by Rationale: Greetings &#32; PerfektesChaos (talk) 13:32, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That code  is a unique identifier within the TeX document.
 * Writers are forced to edit this ID manually if they subsequently quote wiki pages and they have to invent a different ID each time.
 * By DB name and version ID a globally unique ID will be created now.
 * German Wikipedia made this change yesterday.
 * It is even possible to derive the permalink URL from that ID.
 * Has this been tested? --Izno (talk) 19:06, 22 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes, and has been reported to work fine.
 * It is quite easy to see.  is already used within the system message in order to generate   and   is not a drastic change and such ID may consist at least of ASCII letters, colon and digits. --PerfektesChaos (talk) 20:26, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ --Izno (talk) 18:04, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 25 September 2021
Please change the link after "Primary contributors:" to Revision history statistics, which is Wikimedia hosted and maintained instead of hosted by someone personally. Dylsss(talk contribs) 20:14, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Comparing the output for a random article:
 * Revision history statistics
 * Revision history statistics
 * Is the information the same? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:30, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * please confirm you are happy with this change? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:30, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:26, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

MLA style
According to the MLA style guide access-date should be the last parameter. Currently this page outputs the url as the last parameter. The proposal is to move  from the end to before   Nthep (talk) 18:36, 19 April 2023 (UTC)


 * I don't understand.  produces today's date. When I made this change, the citation at the randomly chosen Johnston's genet was:
 * Wikipedia contributors. "Johnston's genet." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 1 Nov. 2022. 20 Apr. 2023. Web.
 * I don't think this is what you intended &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:59, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm just quoting the code from the interface documentation page. So let's go simple - move whatever code outputs the access-date to the end of the output from its current position before the url-link. Nthep (talk) 09:16, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Still confused. There is currently no URL is the MLA citation that I can see. The access date is already at the end. this is the current citation on Johnston's genet:
 * Wikipedia contributors. "Johnston's genet." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 1 Nov. 2022. Web. 20 Apr. 2023.
 * &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:19, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The lack of the url might be another issue. This request stems from a VTRS ticket that I can't access on my phone. I'll reread the ticket later and get back to you. Nthep (talk) 09:38, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * 2023041710004066 is 's ticket. Cabayi (talk) 11:16, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * @MSGJ serve me right from working from memory, the ticket is about the commons version of this page which when I examine it is different, in two ways.
 * It does have the access-date before the url, I'll take the original request there.
 * It includes the url which this page doesn't for MLA. Perhaps this page should include  instead of   (before the access-date).
 * Nthep (talk) 11:57, 20 April 2023 (UTC)