Template:Blockquote/doc

Usage
adds a block quotation to an article page.

This is easier to type and is more wiki-like than the equivalent HTML tags, and has additional pre-formatted attribution parameters for author and source (though these are not usually used in articles; ).

Note: Block quotes do normally contain quotation marks.

Examples
Basic use:

With attribution displayed:

With more attribution:

Examples with "multiline":

Especially useful for translated quotes; see notes about this parameter.
 * with "multiline" ✅


 * for comparison without "multiline" ❌

An ample example:

Parameter list
See also section.

Quoted text
text a.k.a. 1—The material being quoted, without quotation marks around it. It is always safest to name this parameter (rather than use an unnamed positional parameter), because, otherwise, any inclusion of a non-escaped "=" character (e.g., in a URL in a source citation) will break the template.

Displayed attribution
These parameters are for attribution information below the quote; this should not be confused with citing a source. These parameters are entirely optional, and are usually used with famous quotations, not routine block quotations, which are usually sourced at the end of the introductory line immediately before the quotation, with a normal  tag.

author a.k.a. 2 – optional author/speaker attribution information that will appear below the quotation, and preceded with an attribution dash.

title a.k.a. 3 – optional title of the work the quote appears in, to display below the quotation. This parameter immediately follows the output of author (and an auto-generated comma), if one is provided. It does not auto-italicize. Major works (books, plays, albums, feature films, etc.) should be italicized; minor works (articles, chapters, poems, songs, TV episodes, etc.) go in quotation marks. Additional citation information can be provided in a fourth parameter, source, below, which will appear after the title.

source a.k.a. 4 – optionally used for additional source information to display, after title, like so: ; a comma will be auto-generated between the two parameters. If source is used without title, it simply acts as title. (This parameter was added primarily to ease conversion from misuse of the pull quote template for block quotation, but it may aid in cleaner meta-data implementation later.)

character a.k.a. char or 5 – to attribute fictional speech to a fictional character, other citation information. Can also be used to attribute real speech to a specific speaker among many, e.g. in a roundtable/panel transcript, a band interview, etc. This parameter outputs "[Character's name], in" after the attribution dash and before the output of the parameters above, thus one or more of those parameters must also be supplied. If you need to cite a fictional speaker in an article about a single work of fiction, where repeating the author and title information would be redundant, you can just use the author parameter instead of character.

Technically, all citation information can be given in a single parameter, as in: But this is a bit messy, and will impede later efforts to generate metadata from quotation attribution the way we are already doing with source citations. This is much more usable: Later development can assign a CSS  and so forth to these separate parameters, upon which scripts would be able to operate (e.g. to look up things in WikiQuote).

Rarely used technical parameters

 * multiline – keep forced linebreaks in output.Notes:
 * Will only be applied if at least one of these other parameters or its aliases is not empty (including implicit, unnamed parameters):author, title, source, or character.
 * The value does not matter, as long it is not empty. Using a so called speaking parameter (such as  or  ) is highly recommended. Avoid values that can surprise users (e.g.   or  ).
 * style – allows specifying additional CSS styles ( classes) to apply to the element.
 * class – allows specifying additional HTML classes to apply to the same element.

Reference citations
A reference citation can be placed before the quote, after the quote, or in the source parameter: • ✅ Typical use: In the regular-prose introduction to the quotation, when a quotation is given without the displayed author, title, or source parameters:

• At the end of the quotation, when a quotation is given without the displayed author, title, or source parameters, and placement before the quote isn't appropriate (e.g. because the material immediately before the quote isn't cited to the same source or introduces multiple quotes from different sources:

• After the source value (if a value is given for the source parameter other than the itself):

• ❌ Deprecated: After the quoted person's name in author, or after the work's title in title, when a source parameter is not being added: Please avoid this format, as it will pollute the author or title metadata with non-author or non-title information.

Please do not place the citation in a author or source parameter by itself, as it will produce a nonsensical attribution line that looks like this: —&#8239; Please also do not put it just outside the template, as this will cause a:     on a line by itself.

Limitations
If you do not provide text, the template generates a parser error message, which will appear in red text in the rendered page.

If any parameter's actual value contains an equals sign, you use a named parameter (e.g.  , not a blank-name positional parameter. The text before the equals sign gets misinterpreted as a named parameter otherwise. Be wary of URLs, which frequently contain this character. Named parameters are always safer, in this and other templates.

If any parameter's actual value contains characters used for wiki markup syntax (such as pipe, brackets, single quotation marks, etc.), you may need to escape it. See and friends.

Next to right-floated boxes
the text of a block quotation may rarely overflow (in Firefox or other Gecko browsers) a right-floated item (e.g. a box, when that item is below another right-floated item of a fixed size that is narrower. In Safari and other Webkit browsers (and even more rarely in Chrome/Chromium) the same condition can cause the block quotation to be pushed downward. Both of these problems can be fixed by either: There may be other solutions, and future browser upgrades may eliminate the issue. It arises at all because of the   CSS declaration in Mediawiki:Common.css, which itself works around other, more common display problems. A solution that fixes  of the issues is unknown at this time.
 * 1) removing the sizing on the upper item and letting it use its default size (e.g. removing   sizing or upright from a right-floated image above a wider right-floated object that is being overflowed by quotation text; or
 * 2) using style in the quotation template.

Vanishing quotes
In rare layout cases, e.g. when quotes are sandwiched between userboxes, a quotation may appear blanked out, in some browsers. The workaround for this problem is to add style to such an instance of the template.

Line breaks
This template sets a text style which might ignore one blank line, and so the template must be ended with a break (newline) or the next blank line might be ignored. Otherwise, beware inline, as: text here More text here spans a blank line, unless a is ended with a line break, then the next blank line might be ignored and two paragraphs joined.

The element and any templates that use it do not honor newlines:

An easy solution is to use the poem quote template instead of . This is effectively the same as using the poem tag inside, which converts line breaks to tags:

To markup actual paragraphs within block quotations, entire blank lines can be used between them, which will convert to tags:

Note that it may be necessary to put a line break in the wikitext before "and after" in order for the paragraphs to render with the intended separation. (This also makes the wikitext easier to read.)

This paragraph style also works with blockquote, which is a replacement for blockquote that also has parameters to make formatting of the attribution more convenient and consistent.

Blockquote and templates that call it, and are indented with colon, bulleted with asterisk (*), or numbered with number (#), will generate errors and incorrectly display anything after a newline character.

Nested quotations
The element has styles that change the font size: on desktop, text is smaller; on mobile, it is larger. This change is relative to the enclosing context, meaning that if you quote from a source that itself uses a block quotation, you'll find that the inner quotation is either really tiny and hard to read, or really large and barely fits on the screen. To fix this issue, add the parameter font-size:inherit; on any inner templates.

TemplateData
{	"description": "Adds a block quotation.", "params": { "text": { "label": "text", "description": "The text to quote", "type": "content", "required": true, "aliases": [ "1",				"quote" ],			"example": "Cry \"Havoc\" and let slip the dogs of war." },		"author": { "label": "author", "description": "The writer of the source", "type": "content", "required": false, "aliases": [ "2",				"cite", "sign" ],			"example": "William Shakespeare", "suggested": true },		"title": { "label": "title", "description": "The work being quoted from", "type": "content", "required": false, "aliases": [ "3"			],			"example": "Julius Caesar", "suggested": true },		"source": { "label": "source", "description": "A source for the quote", "type": "content", "required": false, "aliases": [ "4"			],			"example": "act III, scene I", "suggested": true },		"character": { "label": "character", "description": "The speaker within the work who is being quoted", "type": "content", "required": false, "aliases": [ "5",               "char" ],			"example": "Mark Antony", "suggested": false },       "multiline": { "label": "multiline", "description": "Keeps forced linebreaks in output", "type": "string", "required": false, "example": "true", "suggested": false },		"style": { "label": "style", "description": "Additional CSS styles (not classes) to apply", "type": "string", "required": false, "example": "font-size:inherit;", "suggested": false },		"class": { "label": "class", "description": "Additional HTML classes to apply", "type": "string", "required": false, "example": "pullquote", "suggested": false }	} }