Template talk:Citation/core/Archive 9

Edition and series inverted?
Is there any specific reason for Edition to go after series information in books? (ETA: It will ALSO get pushed by the  parameter) I think we can all agree the reference below is rather dubious: Circéus (talk) 22:52, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
 * (template)
 * Wyatt, Harold Vivian (1997). Information sources in the life sciences. Guides to information sources 4 (4th ed.). London: Bowker-Saur. ISBN 1-85739-070-9. (Wikitext, for later readers' convenience)

Proposal to add a "type" parameter
I would like to propose adding a "type" parameter, so that we can correctly cite a thesis or dissertation (per APA). For example: Specifically, I would like to insert the following code: immediately before the handling of the Series parameter (or immediately before the Edition parameter if that gets moved per the thread above).
 * Doe, John (2010). Title of work (PhD thesis). Knoxville: University of Tennessee.
 * Doe, John (2010). Title of work (Doctoral dissertation). Knoxville: University of Tennessee.
 * Doe, John (2010). Title of work . Knoxville: University of Tennessee.

This change was suggested by discussion at Template talk:Citation. Kaldari (talk) 22:04, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, I would currently put in under "others". Circéus (talk) 02:26, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * That might well be the easiest solution. Whereas shows
 * others: To record other contributors to the work, such as "illustrated by Smith" or "trans. Smith".
 * this is passed to via the Other parameter, which it seems is more general-purpose than simply "other contributors":
 * Other Other details to be inserted in a particular place
 * So, let's try it.
 * which shows
 * It matches exactly, apart from one period. I think that's what's required? -- Red rose64 (talk) 11:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd be happy with this solution if we had an alias (such as "type=...") for the "others" parameter in cite books, with proper documentation. I'm worried that otherwise in future we will see strange citations such as "other contributors: (PhD Thesis)" if people edit cite books without paying attention to possible abuse of the "others" field. — Miym (talk) 13:35, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Using one parameter for more than one use will eventually cause trouble at some point. It leads to confusing documentation, conflicts about proper formatting, and prevents people from being able to use both functions at once. Additionally, the extra period would be incorrect formatting for a thesis, per APA. Why not just create a new dedicated parameter for the new use and keep it clean (1 param = 1 use). Kaldari (talk) 18:17, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I'd be happy with this solution if we had an alias (such as "type=...") for the "others" parameter in cite books, with proper documentation. I'm worried that otherwise in future we will see strange citations such as "other contributors: (PhD Thesis)" if people edit cite books without paying attention to possible abuse of the "others" field. — Miym (talk) 13:35, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Using one parameter for more than one use will eventually cause trouble at some point. It leads to confusing documentation, conflicts about proper formatting, and prevents people from being able to use both functions at once. Additionally, the extra period would be incorrect formatting for a thesis, per APA. Why not just create a new dedicated parameter for the new use and keep it clean (1 param = 1 use). Kaldari (talk) 18:17, 22 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Citations should be divided, ordered, and numbered into sections and then Other1, Other2, Other3, etc. should be able to substitute for the section. For example if Author Date Title Accessdate is the format, there are four sections. Other2 could substitute for "Date." resulting in Author Other2 Title Accessdate.  This could come in useful for example for unclear dates where one might want to substitute an approximation like "[ca. 1998]."  I'm not sure how to do that currently using the template.  Lambanog (talk) 18:47, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * It's only really possible for unnamed parameters (which are numbered; not having names, there is no means of reading them except by their numbers); but all the parameters of are named, and may be placed in any order. Further, there is no way of determining if, say, author was passed first, second or 47th. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:17, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * If there are no objections, I'll go ahead and add the "type" parameter tomorrow. This will allow us to properly cite a thesis or dissertation, according to APA style (and prevent confusion from using one parameter for more than one purpose). Kaldari (talk) 16:03, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Should the parameter name be more specific? TitleType (the parameter value modifies/adds to the title)?
 * That sounds good to me. Kaldari (talk) 17:35, 1 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I've added TitleType and accompanying documentation. Kaldari (talk) 17:50, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Placement of format and language
If neither  nor   parameter is specified (e.g. when using  without   parameter, or  without  ),   and   are misplaced. E.g.  renders as “”. In terms of, this is  which renders as “”. How could this issue be fixed? Svick (talk) 17:06, 5 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Or why not use German to add at the end of the citation, like it is common particle? See Isospin for example. Headbomb {{{sup|ταλκ}}κοντριβς – WP Physics} 07:00, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

&lt; and &gt; in DOI
Something seems to be messed up if you use greater than or less than signs in the doi. See example:

-Atmoz (talk) 06:44, 9 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Fixed. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:57, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Double-ampersand typo
A introduced an obvious double-ampersand typo. Could you please fix this by replacing "&&" with "&" in this template? Please see. Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 08:08, 13 March 2010 (UTC)
 * &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:43, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Citing a work on Wikisource
Hi. It would be good to be able to cite sources whose text is held on Wikisource - for example, wikisource:The Horseshoe Nebula in Sagittarius. It only seems to be possible to do this using external rather than internal links, or by having a link after the template call. Is there an elegant way for this to be added - perhaps by having a wikisource= parameter? (Caveat that linking to other wikisource langugages should be possible...) Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 10:01, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * You don't need any special parameter for that, you can use something like  which renders as:  Svick (talk) 12:14, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you; I should have thought of that. Mike Peel (talk) 12:38, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

URL duplicated in print
Using any template or citation:

When I do a print or print preview, FireFox 3.6/Win 7 shows:


 * R. Nave. "Confinement of Quarks ( http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsuedu/hbase/Particles/quark.html#c6 )". HyperPhysics. Georgia State University, Department of Physics and Astronomy. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsuedu/hbase/Particles/quark.html#c6 . Retrieved 2008-06-29.

The URL is repeated twice. I tried this on a laptop with FF 3.5 with no add-ons. I do have custom CSS and JS, so I tried logged out with the same results. IE8 on the other hand, shows:


 * R. Nave. "Confinement of Quarks". HyperPhysics. Georgia State University, Department of Physics and Astronomy. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsuedu/hbase/Particles/quark.html#c6 . Retrieved 2008-06-29.

---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 16:51, 20 March 2010 (UTC)


 * There's some funky CSS3 in commonPrint.css which adds the url of external links after their text display in print mode, which unsurprisingly IE fails miserably at implementing. The second url is added in the cite templates themselves with a simpler show-only-in-print-mode that IE can understand.  Happy ‑ melon  18:50, 20 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Are you saying the URL should display twice? ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 19:04, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes; the browser is told to display the url twice; IE just doesn't understand it the first time :D Happy ‑ melon  19:44, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah. Ok then. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 21:15, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Last change breaks Editor fields
The last change to this template by Wtmitchell seems to be breaking the way Editor fields are handled:  renders as “”, but it should be “Editor, ed. (Now)”. This was reported at Template talk:Cite book and Template talk:Citation. I think that change should be reverted until this issue is resolved. Svick (talk) 12:58, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It seems that the same change causes the date to be displayed twice, see threads at Template talk:Cite news and Template talk:Citation. -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:05, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I reverted the edit and after purging the page I noticed this problem on everything is working normally. Parsecboy (talk) 14:17, 20 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, the errors that I noticed are clearing; in some cases a purge was necessary, but the fact that this revert has cured it is a definite indicator that the original edit was the cause. -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:39, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

These are renderings of *

(id="CITEREFlast1coauthors)
 * version prior to wtmitchell changes

(id="CITEREFlast1")
 * version with the wtmitchell changes

(id="CITEREFlast1")
 * current version

I assert that there is currently a problem in that the coauthors field is not rendered by the current version of citation/core. I suggest that this problem should be fixed.

There may be other problems, but I'm not sure what they might be. Can anyone clarify this (preferably via examples such as the above)?

Once the dust settles down from these changes, my intention is to make changes to Cite book and cite journal similar to the changes which I have made to Citation. Comments? Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 01:43, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * There is a problem with my reverted change in that if (1) editors are specified, (2) authors are not specified, and (3) year is specified, then the editors are not rendered.
 * year specified: *
 * year not specified: *
 * The conditional which I added for Coauthors is immediately followed by a conditional for Date. I sandboxed a test version adding a pipe char for the not-satisfied case in my added conditional, thinking that might be the problem, but that didn't fix it. I've been staring at the code and can't see the problem. Could someone else please take a look? Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill)

I redid the Coauthors change, and appear to have succeeded in avoiding recommitting the error which caused this problem. I've sandboxed it at Template:Citation/core/sandbox and done some ad-hoc testing. It seems to work. I seem to recall that there was a testing suite somewhere for this &mdash; does anybody know where that might be? Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 00:37, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I found Template:Citation/testcases. Those tests don't turn up any problems, but they don't look comprehensive. The sandboxed fix to the reverted change seems to work OK, but I'd appreciate some more eyes on it. If nobody objects, I'll go live with the replacement in a few days. Trial-by-fire quickly turned up problems which testing hadn't caught the last time around &mdash; maybe that's what we have to rely on. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 04:55, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

I've gone live with the redone Coauthors change from the sandbox. If no problems surface in a few days, I'll make changes to cite book and cite journal similar to the change made here to Citation. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 03:20, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Edit request
In Strand School bibliography:

^ a b c d e Thomas White, 'History of Strand School, 1875-1913', written for MA in Science Education, Chelsea College, University of London, 1984

should read

^ a b c d e Dr Keith Dakin-White, 'History of Strand School, 1875-1913', written for MA in Science Education, Chelsea College, University of London, 1984

217.207.35.194 (talk) 08:45, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I suspect this is something you should discuss on Talk:Strand School. I don't think there is any problem with this template. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:31, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The citation in question isn't using any template. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 12:37, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Editor
In Template_talk:Cite_encyclopedia, which uses Template:Citation/core a few questions were raised, and one of them seems to come from this template.

Why does render as  with the editor preceded by "in", as though it were the publication? Debresser (talk) 09:38, 6 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Apparently because Template:Cite encyclopedia expects the name of the encyclopedia to be specified in a parameter named encyclopedia and, if the cite concerns a specific encyclopedia article, expects the title of that article to be specified in a parameter named title. renders as  See the documentation for Cite encyclopedia for more info.

Titles, IncludedWorks, and URLs
This grows out of Template talk:Cite book.

* *

Is this the intended behavior? Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 04:34, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure, but it is intended that a citation with contribution=, title=, and url= has the link on the contribution, not the title. Most often that combination means a paper in a conference proceedings, or a chapter in an edited volume, so the contribution is the right anchor for the link. I suspect that title/chapter of cite book go through the same parameters. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:49, 16 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Going from memory that seems to be the correct behaviour, although it has been awhile since I worked with Citation/core at a low level while working on things like Cite IETF. Perhaps Cite IETF/regression tests will help? --Tothwolf (talk) 17:23, 16 April 2010 (UTC)


 * The reason I posted the question here instead of echoing it from Cite book to Citation was that I wondered if such processing decisions should be made here in core. Core, here, is not dealing with contributions or chapters, it is dealing with Title, URL, IncludedWorkTitle and IncludedWorkURL. It seems strange to me that core should make this decision to associate URL with IncludedWorkTitle instead of with Title in cases where IncludedWorkURL is not specified. Some existing citations, however, probably rely on the current Citation/core behavior.
 * There's been a suggestion, which I think is a good one, that an optional parameter be added to allow this behavior to be overridden. How about adding support for an optional parameter named TitleURL which would be an alternative to the URL paramerter which, if supplied along with the Title parameter, would wrap the Title parameter in an external link to the contents specified for TitleURL? Once this parameter becomes available in core, code could be added to the Citation and Cite xxx templates to enable its use in citations.
 * Alternatively, this processing could be moved out of core and moved up to the higher-level templates which use it. I think that makes more sense requirements-wise, but doing it that way would need the changes in all the templates to be rolled out at the same time. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 01:31, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
 * At the same time? Why? It would seem that the higher-level templates could each be implemented in the new way in sequence, no longer passing TitleURL, until it was irrelevant whether Core implemented it, at which time it could be removed with no disruption. Am I missing something? User:LeadSongDog come howl  20:26, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
 * You're right I must have had my thinking cap on sideways.
 * TitleURL, as described above, could be implemented in core, and would have no effect on existing cites.
 * This done, titleurl could be implemented in citation and cite xxx, passing any content to core in TitleURL.
 * At that point, wikitext cites could use the new titleurl parameter to associate its link with title instead of chapter.
 * Then, optionally,
 * Citation and Cite xxx could be modified to do whatever special handling is needed re URLs, titles, chapters, contributions, etc. (e.g., passing url content as IncludedWorkURL instead of as URL if it is desired to have that associated with IncludedWork instead of with Title).
 * That would render the special processing done in core to do that special handling redundant and unnecessary, and core can be made more straightforward by removing it. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 23:16, 17 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Could you work up some example code in the sandbox? I think I get what you are saying but as complex as Citation/core is I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around this. Also, don't forget about the special handling of ArchiveURL and OriginalURL with IncludedWorkURL and URL. We also have to figure out how we'll handle the URL changes for the COinS metadata... --Tothwolf (talk) 01:08, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I thought about doing that but wimped out. I'm a bit gun-shy after causing a problem with the recent coauthors changes. Looking at this code always gives me a headache, but if anything comes of twiddling the code in my userspace I'll sandbox it and mention that here. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 08:10, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, I've sandboxed a first cut at changes to add support for an optional TitleURL parameter intended as an alternative to the URL parameter, intended to force placement of the associated link with the Title paraeter instead of the IncludedWorkTitle parameter if supplied. I've been testing its behavior with the following:


 * with one or more parameters selectively removed. I'd appreciate more eyes on this and comments about it or fixes for problems with it.
 * FWICS, changes will be needed in Citation and Cite xxx templates to handls URL, TitleURL properly when archiveurl is specified when support for TitleURL is added up there. Wtmitchell  (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 06:47, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Some elements reordered
I have fiddled with some of the post-title elements. The order previously went series, volume, others, edition, however, this means that I attempted to fix that problem. This might cause template uses where "volume" was used for series number to break. Ideally I'd suggest these two uses of "volume" be either fully segregated, or the "multivolume" use be phased out (In formatting, bolding that is dubious outside a few specialist uses, and makes volume titles awkward. Plus I don't think it's used for COinS, but series number is, I believe). Circéus (talk) 15:03, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
 * "Volume", which at least cite book explicitly says is for multivolume works, ends up being used for series numbering, thus carrying two completely different sets of information.
 * "Series" ends up appearing before "edition".
 * Volume is frequently used for series number, in my experience. In fact, most of the time that I use series= I also use volume= in conjunction with it. So, this change, which was not discussed and was not tested in the sandbox, breaks the formatting of a large fraction of the instances of citation that it affects. I'm reverting until we can discuss it properly. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:10, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Creating new template; need help
Hi, I'm from WP:APPLE and I've created cite mac as a convenient way to source the technical specifications of legacy Macintosh models. The backend is fairly crude, and does not use this template, and I was hoping someone good with template syntax could improve it for us. Thanks, HereToHelp (talk to me) 17:38, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
 * You could also ask on WP:VPT which is probably the best place for technical questions. One thing you could do is set up Template:Cite mac/testcases which could have some testcases for how you want the output to appear. See for example Template:Citation/testcases.--Salix (talk): 21:16, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Documentation is missing the PS parameter
The documentation is missing the PS parameter. It seems cite journal passes in the postscript as this one, is it enough to copy the documentation from cite journal for postscript? Rjwilmsi 18:55, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The default behavior of terminating the quote with a period is done in journal by defaulting the PS parameter to contain a period, not in core. If quote is not empty, Core simply outputs quote enclosed in double-quotes and followed immediately by PS. I'll boldly change the documentation for core to reflect this; someone will fix my error if I've got it wrong. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 07:12, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * In core, PS is always output if present, and is independent of quote. The main difference in observed behaviour is related to how the front-end templates call core:
 * passes
 * and pass
 * passes
 * Thus, if, or  are given both quote and postscript, postscript is ignored.
 * Note the subtle difference in the position of the dot on compared to /.
 * It should also be noted that when changes from  to the other types, it automatically adds &lt;!-- None --&gt;, which suppresses the dot. If you want the dot, either make it explicit - . - or remove that parameter entirely. -- Red rose64 (talk) 13:56, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Right. I apparently botched a WP:sandbox test and and looked crosseyed at the code. I've corrected my edit to the documentation. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 02:04, 25 July 2010 (UTC)