Template:MC ref/doc

Usage
An easy and optional method to make inline citation references to Metacritic for albums. Always substitute this template. All fields are required and are only made up of plain text (i.e. there is no styling such as italics for album titles:


 * 1) the Metacritic id, for instance "music/collapse-into-now/rem"
 * 2) the name of the album, for instance "Collapse into Now"
 * 3) the name of the recording artist, for instance "R.E.M."

To use this example elaborated above, insert:


 * music/collapse-into-now/rem>

to get the following reference:

Known issues and to-do

 * You cannot actually substitute inside of reference tags. This is a MediaWiki-wide issue and cannot be resolved by this template or on this project. The workaround is a simple hack where the trailing right angle bracket at the very end must be manually inserted. Cumbersome, but this still results in less typing for the user and ensures conformity and best practices for the template parameters (for instance, Cite-web recommends using " " for undated web pages, but only a very small fraction of Metacritic references actually use this).
 * The  defaults to ISO dates. This will likely be resolved on individual pages that have tags such as use dmy dates and use mdy dates. If not, a bot can fix these.
 * In the future, this should be able to draw Metacritic ids from Wikidata.