Template talk:Citation/core/Archive 6

Unknown archive date
Is there a convention for what to use for the  parameter when the date is unknown? I have used " ", but the result looks a bit silly, in my opinion. --Lambiam 19:12, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Could you please post the link to such an archive? Thx. -- Fullstop (talk) 20:25, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Checking Lambiam's contribs, I found one here with "an unknown date" given for the archivedate. Plastikspork (talk) 21:12, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The "Economist" one? Even though the periodical= field says "The Economist", the url= and contribution= refer to a website unrelated to the Economist. That makes that citation a classic case of false citation. The ostensible "archive" is not an archive. Its the source that was used by the other website. -- Fullstop (talk) 22:01, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Methinks that  actually does refer to a website very much related to The Economist. What is more, there are no   or   fields in the template, nor in fact in any other template used on the page. You must be talking about some other citation in some other article.  --Lambiam 06:08, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * So 'tis. Its ./core's formatting that makes "archive"s appear as the source. -- Fullstop (talk) 10:56, 18 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Next to the one already given by Plastikspork (which actually uses "an unspecified date"), there is also one (not created by me) in the article İhsan Hakan. --Lambiam 06:13, 12 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Neither of those "archives" is an archive. What's "needed" there is a linked "(mirror)" or some such at the end of the citation. Moreover, those are newspaper articles, not "web". -- Fullstop (talk) 10:56, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Z3988
For some reason the end of this "microformat" contains. I do not see what it's purpose is. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:35, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * found the diff. It seems to me, this extra span can be remove and the style be added to the Z3988 span itself. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:40, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * That's how we had it before, but there were problems with that. The April 2008 discussion is here. -- Fullstop (talk) 15:03, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, the button inserts itself into the content of the span ? That is unfortunate. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 16:07, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

authorlink w/o author or last/first set

 * (I searched the archive of Wikipedia talk:Citation templates and saw no discussion of this)

For and the similar templates supporting author, first, last, authorlink, I'd like to request the following: if authorlink is set, and author/first/last are not set, the template should consider authorlink to be the author's name and display it as a wikilink. In other words, setting authorlink alone would be treated as shorthand for setting both authorlink and author to the same thing. If you're concerned about unknown potential backwards compatibility issues, creating a new parameter called authorwikilink or whatever is an alternative. The point of all of this is that it is not uncommon for published authors to have articles about them, and if authorlink is set, it is better to do what is done in the main text of articles and assume that the un-disambiguated version is the right version. Thanks. 66.167.48.5 (talk) 01:54, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
 * But don't we always want the format of the author name to be "surname, given"? We can't do that if we only have the authorlink. — RockMFR 13:56, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Deactivated request pending clarification and further discussion. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:23, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
 * "Surname, given" is preferred by (which says the use of author is deprecated there) but, , and  allow for both formats.  Thanks. 67.101.7.151 (talk) 06:34, 25 August 2009 (UTC).
 * Please don't re-add the {editprotected} until consensus is assured. -- Fullstop (talk) 10:55, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Just to chip in, I don't think it's possible to do this while producing full metadata for the citation, because the metadata handles authors' surnames and forenames differently. Martin  (Smith609 – Talk)  13:34, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Cite album-notes
The "pages=" parameter of Cite album-notes is not consistent with the other core citation templates, and it does not have a "page=" parameter. Should it be updated or replaced with a version that is based on Citation/core? &mdash; John Cardinal (talk) 01:06, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Cite element, take two
editprotected Please sync with the sandbox. As the CSS we added after the previous discussion has decached, we can now use a  instead of. TIA. —Ms2ger (talk) 08:42, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ — Jake   Wartenberg  01:45, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Citation/make link, take two
editprotected

In last month's discussion there was consensus that Citation/core should not depend on publicly-visible templates like Link and Para, but should instead stick with the Citation name space; the easiest way to do this is to move or copy Link to Citation/make link and to have Citation/core use Citation/make link; also, it should simply inline the  elements rather than invoke Para. There was also consensus that the current method of supporting italic links with Link and Italiclink is not as good as the  method, because it bloats the HTML with  s. (Some other issues were discussed, but they didn't reach consensus.) This matter was put off until after the cite element problem could be fixed, which just now happened (see  above), so it's time to install the fix now.

Please sync with the sandbox by installing. Also, please protect Citation/make link so that it has the same protection level as Citation/core. Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 14:24, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't be using the &lt;tt> tag. Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 14:41, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I copied the &lt;tt> tag from Para. Obviously &lt;code> can be used instead. I made to do that; please install that too. Or it may be simpler just to install    . Eubulides (talk) 14:52, 12 September 2009 (UTC)


 * You have para= where it was url=, but that should be archiveurl= anyway. See . Upon reflection, I presume we should not use citation error as well? ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:29, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I the typo where I mistakenly put para instead of url, and updated my above comments to mention . In discussion earlier, I think the idea was that Citation error was part of the citation namespace and could be used. For now I'd rather not combine this with the archiveurl change, to keep this patch simple (I don't understand the archiveurl business, I'm afraid). Eubulides (talk) 15:41, 12 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Archiveurl was mistakenly changed to url here when citation error was added. The other changes are simply to make the two error messages consistent. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:47, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I followed up about the archiveurl change in  above. I'd still like to solve that problem separately. Eubulides (talk) 16:06, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I found one more problem with the previous patches: the "=" in the argument to Citation error also needs to be protected with . I  the problem and updated my above comments accordingly. Eubulides (talk) 16:49, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

✅ —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 01:32, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Request
editprotected The line  should have a dot after "ed". See Template_talk:Cite_book. Debresser (talk) 09:01, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm confused. Depending on the value of Sep, there is a . after ed isn't there ? The only reason i can see for a missing . is a missing value for Sep. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:06, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I take that request back, because I see now I missed something. Perhaps somebody who understand the rules behind this template better than I do could answer the question on Template talk:Cite book? Debresser (talk) 22:36, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I've posted a possible solution there. -- Fullstop (talk) 22:03, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Sources with multiple authors
I've been having a problem in the Blood pressure article with the links from the footnotes for Pickering 2005 to the References section. I've tried to debug it in various ways without success, except to find that the problem is related to the presence of one or more coauthors in the Pickering 2005 article. Have you tested the changes to see how they work for sources with multiple authors with respect to the link from the harv footnote to the source in a Reference section, like in the case of the Blood pressure article? Thanks. --Bob K31416 (talk) 20:31, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
 * In the, instead of
 * use this:
 * use this:


 * and instead of
 * use this:
 * Since there are more than 3 names, the "et al" thing will happen automatically. You could also try putting in further firstn/lastn pairs up to a total of 9 (and renumber the one which I've shown as author9, which is unfortunate because this paper has 10 authors. The field coauthors doesn't work when last2 is specified. However, don't feed more than four lastnames into . --Redrose64 (talk) 22:35, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Since there are more than 3 names, the "et al" thing will happen automatically. You could also try putting in further firstn/lastn pairs up to a total of 9 (and renumber the one which I've shown as author9, which is unfortunate because this paper has 10 authors. The field coauthors doesn't work when last2 is specified. However, don't feed more than four lastnames into . --Redrose64 (talk) 22:35, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Since there are more than 3 names, the "et al" thing will happen automatically. You could also try putting in further firstn/lastn pairs up to a total of 9 (and renumber the one which I've shown as author9, which is unfortunate because this paper has 10 authors. The field coauthors doesn't work when last2 is specified. However, don't feed more than four lastnames into . --Redrose64 (talk) 22:35, 5 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Nice work! I incorporated your suggestion into the article. : ) --Bob K31416 (talk) 00:49, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

HTML id
Each cite is assigned an id with the citation class. The id is defined as ref if it exists, else it is built as:


 * CITEREF + author surname(s) + editor surname(s) + year if it exists, else date

If no author surname is defined, then no id is generated.

Most of the citation templates, such as cite web, simplify this by extracting the year from the date.

For example:

Results in id="CITEREFDrucker2009". If there is no date, then id="CITEREFDrucker".

The real problem occurs when the id is duplicated:

For all of these, id="CITEREFDrucker2009", which results in invalid HTML.

You can run any well referenced article through the W3C Markup Validation Service and see errors relating to duplicated ids, for example today's featured article Her Majesty's Theatre. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:52, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Perhaps it could be fixed using the full date instead of only the year. Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 17:40, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * References such as books only have a year, thus if an author writes two or more books within a year then the id would be duplicated. Cite web references quite often do not have dates. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 18:52, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Why do we need these ids at all? Happy ‑ melon  19:00, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Citation doc says "This template creates an HTML anchor, linked by #CITEREF followed by up to 4 author/editor last names and the date, to which the Harvard citation and related templates can link." An the harvard doc is somewhat confusing. Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 19:57, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * See WP:CITESHORT, WP:Parenthetical referencing and Wikilinks to full references if you are unclear on how the Harv family of templates are used. CharlesGillingham (talk) 21:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)


 * It could be fixed adding "IncludedWorkTitle" and "Title" to the mix of parameters... Also "At" for references pointing to the same article/book/web but to different page. I think fixing this could break the existing Harvard templates. Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 20:00, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, that will break harvnb etc. The solution is to add a letter to the year when using multiple references from the same author in the same year. Applying that convention to wp would merely entail specifying year =2009a, year= 2009b etc. -- Fullstop (talk) 21:06, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Ugh. Whoever wanted to maybe parse the year parameter as  year, anyway...?   Happy ‑ melon  21:15, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * H-melon is right. The year parameter is for... years. Is there a way for the template to detect the existence of other citation templates and automatically change the id? Not as far as I know, ain't I right? Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 21:38, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, I told you what has worked for um, everyone, for, um, decades. Don't use it if you don't like it, but expecting the year parameter to be parsable as a pure number/date is tilting at windmills. Indeed, Happy-melon should know this. :) -- Fullstop (talk) 21:54, 20 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Citation/core does include ref which will set the id, but that is not really a fix. We need a good id generator like this GUID - Unique ID Generator. Or a way to create a hash from common parameters like title and URL. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 22:24, 20 September 2009 (UTC)


 * As someone noted above, CITEREFs are generated for harvnb and co. Besides the fact that harvnb and co don't have title and URL, articles that use harvnb and co don't have CITEREF id collisions, so they don't need a hash generator. And the articles that don't use harvnb don't need CITEREFs, so they don't need a hash generator either.
 * Duplicated id's generate "invalid" html, but do not affect functionality. There is no solution for the (non-)problem, and the (non-)problem has no effect on anyone anyway, so its probably pointless to grieve over it.
 * If the duplicate ids were a significant issue, tidy would be stripping the duplicates. But tidy doesn't have that functionality at all. So there's the "problem" that would make sense to fix. :) -- Fullstop (talk) 00:38, 21 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Citation/core generates an id, thus every template based on it has an id. Perhaps it should not generate an id by default, but I would not bet that no one is using it. I believe this came up on the Village Pump before, but I never poked into it until it came up on one of the template talk pages. We should never render invalid HTML, as it affects reuse, nor should we rely on Tidy to fix the small stuff. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 00:46, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Please see  below. Eubulides (talk) 19:34, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

This change has broken interoperability of harv and cite journal, as described at Template talk:Cite journal. Please revert. I'm quite unhappy that this discussion happened only here rather than somewhere more visible. As for how to extract the year: the correct solution is to use year=1989a, year=1989b etc in cases where the year is ambiguous, because the same ambiguity is also present for human readers who can't see the html coding. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:09, 25 October 2009 (UTC)


 * The discussion happened on this page, but we mentioned it in Template talk:Harvard citation and Template talk:Harvard citation no brackets; these are the only templates affected by the change in functionality. That "correct solution" is not correct for the vast majority of articles that do not use Harvard citations and do not want to change 1989 to 1989a for no apparent reason. For more, please see the discussion about this in  below. Eubulides (talk) 05:10, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Citation classes
Hello, I'm trying to update the citation templates for the es.wikipedia. Are these "citation classes" in the initial  tag actually used in some .css or so? I can see some specifications for "citation" in MediaWiki:Common.css but nothing specific for "citation book" or "citation journal" for example.

Thank you in advance. Chanchicto (talk) 17:33, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Because those citation templates uses Citation/core as a meta-template. So "citation" class applies to them too. Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 17:51, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
 * (ec) If you have class, it doesn't mean that the element is a member of that one class, but that it is member of two classes:   and  . And, currently, there are no rules that would apply for the   class (at least in Vector skin). But these could be useful for custom user styles. Svick (talk) 17:56, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Identifier tweaks
Per Template_talk:Citation and Template_talk:Citation, could you replace the lines: 

#if: | ISBN }}{{

Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 15:41, 26 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Those changes look reasonable but what do they have to do with the talk page discussion you linked to? —David Eppstein (talk) 15:49, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
 * No idea. I updated the above post with the correct links. Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 15:57, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
 * The last change (for PMC) is good, but the first two changes are overkill. It's already obvious, after you click on {{PMID|0123467}} or on {{ISBN|0-123-45678-9}}. what a PMID and an ISBN are. Adding these URLs will cause WP:OVERLINKING and article bloat for insufficiently good reason. If uniformity is desired, let's remove the unnecessary links from "doi" etc. Eubulides (talk) 16:05, 26 October 2009 (UTC)


 * There's consensus to link to the identifiers in the citation templates. ALL the templates do it. It doesn't make sense to have some identifiers linked, and others unlinked. Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 16:51, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that uniformity is good. The consensus in Template_talk:Citation  is that uniformity is good under the assumption that identifiers should be separately linked, but I was not aware that there was a (presumably earlier) consensus that the identifiers should be separately linked. To help me understand the issues here, could you please point me to the discussion on that topic? Eubulides (talk) 17:37, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
 * There's no prior discussion, it's simply how everyone does it. arxiv, JSTOR, PMC, bibcode, etc... all the identifiers are linked to their corresponding articles. No real reason why ISBN and PMIDs should be treated in special ways. The wiki software treats cases like {{PMID|132131}} and {{ISBN|0-131-23242-2}} automatically so people don't have to bother with templates to produce links. Since this is a template, people have already bothered with it to make things uniform. It defeats the purpose of using templates for uniformity to produce non-uniform outputs, IMO, and you'd lose the link to the PMID article if you don't know what a PMID is. Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 21:59, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * {{done}} &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 23:14, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Language
Could we rig the Language parameter to take ISO abbreviations? (Adjusting documentation to point to that list:Iso_language_code - I would vote for the THREE (3) letter abbreviations) Or point to a list the languages that are acceptable?...I just tripped over a couple using ES for Spanish...and some with "Mexican"... -- Mjquinn_id (talk) 18:25, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Italicized title containing italics
editprotected This problem was reported in Template talk:Cite journal  but it's generic to all the citation templates that use italic titles. If the title itself contains italics, these italics are not turned into roman text as they should be. For example, this: currently generates this: and all the title is currently italicized. The word "Constellation" should not be italicized; the title should read "The Constellation Question Answered". The obvious fix is to move the italicization of the work title to inside the call to Citation/make link, rather than outside. I've made a patch to do that, and have tested it in Template:Cite journal/testcases (it's the last test case). Please install. Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 18:30, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I think this would be better solved by adding  to MediaWiki:Common.css. (I'm disabling the editprotected request for now.) —Ms2ger (talk) 19:05, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Note that I have a number of other fixes currently in the sandbox. They have been tested and to the best of my knowledge should be safe to merge now. I had planned to do some additional work on the Place parameter but I will not likely have time for the next week or so. For more details, see this discussion. --Tothwolf (talk) 19:20, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
 * "I think this would be better solved by adding  to MediaWiki:Common.css." Sorry, I have no idea what MediaWiki:Common.css does or how exactly to add " " to it. Can you please install that fix, whatever it is, into MediaWiki:Common.css? Or, if there's some reason why that would take some time or delay, can you please install  here in the meantime? The simple patch works now, and can be used until the better patch is installed into MediaWiki:Common.css. Eubulides (talk) 05:01, 14 November 2009 (UTC) PS. I followed up at MediaWiki talk:Common.css . Eubulides (talk) 05:21, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Fixing Common.css didn't work
Followup discussion at MediaWiki talk:Common.css  indicates that the Common.css patch doesn't work, due to a bug in HTML Tidy, is a hairy piece of code that I guess is not likely to be fixed soon. While it'll be nice to see HTML Tidy get fixed, in the meantime let's install to work around this instance of the problem. This simple patch won't hurt even when (if?) HTML Tidy and Common.css get fixed; and in the meantime it fixes our bug. Eubulides (talk) 18:16, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Tidy doesn't seem to be as sane as I thought it was. Go ahead with this patch, then. —Ms2ger (talk) 18:39, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅. Amalthea  00:24, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't really see an issue with the change and it does fix the behaviour. Here are some examples:
 * Example
 * Example


 *  Example 
 *  Example 


 *  Example 
 *  Example 


 *  Example 
 *  Example 


 *  Example 
 *  Example 













What I find interesting is that the output of Special:ExpandTemplates is correct, but the rendered version which I guess goes through tidy, is not. --Tothwolf (talk) 19:02, 14 November 2009 (UTC)