Template talk:Cite patent/core

Documentation request
Please replace  with. Thanks. -- Suntag  ☼  16:53, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * [[Image:Yes check.svg|20px]] Done. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:02, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

What is Ref?
Toward the beginning of the Citation/patent code, an #if  parser function has a condition string of. As indicated in my analysis of this template, I do not see a parameter "Ref" getting called and cannot determine why a pipe would be followed by nothing or why an undefined (or possibly null) parameter would be used as a condition string. Whence came "Ref"? Why does the pipe character "|" immediately follow "Ref"?  I have RTFM before posting these questions, but remain clueless.--Rpclod (talk) 13:21, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
 * This template is mean to be called from the Citation template, which uses Ref in some instances to link inline citations with bibliography citations. However, the "Ref" pass-through is missing from the patent code of Citation, and ought to be added, the same as it is for the non-patent code. CO GDEN  00:15, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Should be span, not cite
Please install so that this template uses   rather than. Please see Template talk:Citation/core/Archive 1 for why it should be done this way. Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 20:02, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Done. — RockMFR 02:19, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

URL broken?
It seems EPTO urls generated should now be of the simpler form http://v3.espacenet.com/searchResults?NUM=US20060036965

rather than the older http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=20060036965&KC=&FT=E

Could someone please confirm this and, if it is so, correct the template? LeadSongDog come howl!  21:52, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Missing space
I am using Cite patent here with Alan Dower Blumlein and Musical Industries, Limited. These are carried over to Citation/patent as Assignee1 and Assignee2. The result is displayed, in part, as "assigned to Alan Dower Blumleinand Musical Industries, Limited". Please note the missing space before the word "and". Could somebody please fix this. Many thanks, HairyWombat 19:10, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Later. I have fixed this in the sandbox, and tested it in a testcases page I created. Unfortunately, other changes have been made to the sandbox, and this prevents me requesting that the sandbox be synced to the main template. Perhaps User:Smith609, who seems to be working on the sandbox, could tidy it up. HairyWombat 21:12, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Even later. I have re-synced the sandbox with the main template, and re-applied my fix for this problem. I have requested immediately below for the sandbox to be deployed.

Please copy the sandbox to the main template. It contains an uncontroversial fix for the problem described immediately above.

Thank you. HairyWombat 19:38, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Done. Plastikspork ―Œ (talk) 03:20, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

please change permanently url v3.espacenet.com to worldwide.espacenet.com
What I suggest is: (sources are mentioned below)

in Template:Citation/patent change s/v3\.espacenet/worldwide\.espacenet/ (change "v3" to "worldwide" ) Reason:
 * Espacenet run by the EPO has permanently changed their server urls from v3.espacenet.com to worldwide.espacenet.com . Old deep v3-url (stands for version3) will work for a while, but are deprecated.

Sources:
 * http://worldwide.espacenet.com/ mainpage information
 * http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage_Diskussion:Patent
 * http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage:Patent

--Wikinaut (talk) 08:31, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Is that really all that is needed, or should the rest of the URL be changed too? In other words, is  going to continue working, or is that part of the "v3" deal that is going to go away and we should change to something like  ? Anomie⚔ 22:57, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Please only change v3 to worldwide as originally suggested by me.
 * Your hint to replace more is appreciated, but this(your) deep link does not fall back to what the espacenet team has coined "SmartSearch". Try for example the number US7777777. This does work with my link, but does not work with your link. So, the original link is more "robust" and flexible with respect to the number entries (patent application, patent publication numbers and so on).
 * Summary: please only change v3 to worldwide — as was originally suggested by me. Thanks in advance.
 * --Wikinaut (talk) 08:37, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
 * ✅ No need to get so defensive about it. Anomie⚔ 13:46, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

Proposal to add an unindexed inventor parameter
Based on this previous discussion, a "free format" unindexed inventor parameter was added to the cite patent template. Since the cite patent template now calls this template, that functionality was lost.

The unindexed inventor parameter is analogous the unindexed author parameter in the cite journal template that is often used to create Vancouver system citations. Since journal and patent are sometimes cited within the same article and these articles frequently use the Vancouver citation style, for consistency, it would be desirable to add the option of displaying inventors in the Vancouver style and an unindexed parameter would provide that option. Furthermore, the number of inventors that can be listed in currently limited to four. There would be no such limitation with the unindexed inventor parameter. Finally, the unindexed parameter would provide a way to minimize COinS bloat.

This parameter has been implemented in the citation/patent/sandbox (see WO application 2007/050353 in citation/patent/testcases as an example of how this parameter would be rendered). Is there support in adding a unindexed inventor parameter to this template? Boghog (talk) 12:49, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Support, but sandbox needs work: As far as I can see, the main difference in that in the Vancouver System, author/inventor names are abbreviated to at most two initials (with no periods). The change accommodates this. However, what happens when Inventor is used in addition to Surname1, Given1, etc? At the moment, the sandbox still uses Surname1 for COinS (good) but displays Surname1, etc, instead of Inventor (bad). I have added this mixed case to the testcases. HairyWombat 19:44, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Normally I don't think one would define both parameters in the same template especially considering one of the justifications was to reduce bloat, not increase it. Nevertheless I have modified the sandbox version so that if both parameters are defined, the only unindexed inventor parameter is used to render the displayed inventor list while indexed inventor parameters are used to generate the COinS data. Boghog (talk) 20:54, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Trust me, some editors will do this. Looks good. HairyWombat 22:06, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Proposal to add DisplayedPublicationNumber parameter
Currently the patent number that is rendered by this template is identical to the patent number that is used to link to the Espacenet database. Based on this previous discussion, it has become apparent that the rendered patent number may need to be tweaked in some cases. For example, the number of leading zeros in a functional query link may differ from what has been published in the original patent document. Furthermore a slash is often added after the first four digits that represents the year in the original patent, but this slash is not allowed in the query (even if included as "%47" in the html link). One possible solution is to add an optional DisplayedPublicationNumber to this template. The current PublicationNumber parameter would still be used to create the link but if the DisplayedPublicationNumber is also present the later is used instead of the former to render the displayed link.

This parameter has been implemented in the citation/patent/sandbox (see US application 2005/0038718 and WO application 2007/050353 in citation/patent/testcases as an example of how this parameter would be rendered). Is there support in adding a unindexed inventor parameter to this template? Boghog (talk) 13:26, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Strong support: The main need for this is with US patent applications. These are shown as "2005/0038718" on the paper application, "20050038718" on the USPTO website, and "2005038718" in Espacenet. Note that these last two are different numbers. Although the difference is only a leading zero in the number, because this comes after the four digit date, this will be very confusing to the average Wikipedia reader who does not understand the patent process. (Well, it confused me.) Being able to display "2005/0038718" makes the whole mess a lot clearer to people who are not patent professionals. Note that an alternative solution, which would be far easier for the editors but requires a lot more work from the template, is to specify "2005/0038718" in the parameter PublicationNumber and for the template to do the rest. HairyWombat 20:31, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Later. The alternative solution puts the intelligence into the template instead of relying on editors. Most editors who want to use cite patent will not be familiar with the patent process, and will find it difficult to understand what they have to do (although this can be ameliorated to some extent by a careful doc page). In case somebody wants to implement this, here is the pseudo code for a possible algorithm:

 Copy the value of paramenter PublicationNumber to a temporary variable (This preserves the original for display.) Strip all non-digit characters from the temporary variable Count the number of characters remaining in the temporary variable Set errorFlag = FALSE If (Count >= 12) then Set errorFlag = TRUE Display red error message Else if (Count == 11) then If (Fifth character != "0") then Set errorFlag = TRUE Display red error message Else Delete the fifth character from the temporary variable Endif Endif If (errorFlag == FALSE) then Use remaining digits in the temporary variable to form URL for link Endif
 * This makes the new parameter DisplayedPublicationNumber unnecessary. I am not very familiar with templates, so it would be better if somebody else implemented this. HairyWombat 02:35, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Given the current limitations in template parsing tools (see for example this discussion), what you are requesting is I think almost impossible to implement. If and when this is implemented, what you are requesting should be much easier. However even if this were possible, I think implementing this proposal would potentially cause more problems than it would solve because of unforeseen special cases.  I think the original proposal is simple and straight forward and we should stick with it.  Boghog (talk) 07:59, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

US design patents
As per discussions at Template talk:Cite patent and Template talk:US patent, I would like some special handling to be added for US design patents. gives and goes to google patents fine but doesn't provide for many details. gives and allows for a lot more details but doesn't handle US design patents as-is. It seems those patents require an extra  added to the generated URL. My proposal is to tweak the code as follows:

Does this seem reasonable?  Stepho  talk 09:41, 13 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Any comments for or against? Anybody home?  Stepho  talk 05:00, 27 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Stepho-wrs, that URL no longer works, even with the additional parameters. Any idea what might make it work? – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 09:32, 28 July 2014 (UTC)


 * seems to work okay.  Stepho  talk 14:13, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 6 April 2016
I've added an explicit url parameter to the sandbox page, along with some tests in the test cases.

As seen in the test cases, this is useful for when a patent is too old to be on espacenet. This has been requested a couple times on Template_talk:Cite_patent. I also have a change sandboxed for Template:Cite patent to take advantage of this feature that I can add in once this request is accepted. --Skrapion (talk) 07:54, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Skrapion (talk) 07:54, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done Izno (talk) 11:29, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Please use HTTPS for worldwide.espacenet.com link
Espacenet supports HTTPS. (For at least some patent URLs, such as, Espacenet does a 302 redirect to an HTTPS URL.) Using HTTPS for the link to worldwide.espacenet.com should provide increased privacy and security for users. Please change  in the template to   instead. Thanks. --Elegie (talk) 11:49, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done Cabayi (talk) 11:56, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Always has a ref=harv, which is bad
Currently the template adds a ref=harv or similar by default. This can be turned off by manually inserting ref=. But this is not clear, it's normally invisible.

I think we should add the |ref= to the basic template so that it is obvious to the user that it exists and can be more easily modified.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:25, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * You are, I think, mistaken.  does not set harv.  That is a function of  which, since, has had this:
 * You declare this to be bad but give no evidence to support that declaration.
 * Regardless, whatever it is that you want to do or have done, does not appear to be the correct place.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:47, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Regardless, whatever it is that you want to do or have done, does not appear to be the correct place.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:47, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

date format
Please add support for, working the same way as in citation. Thanks. — howcheng  {chat} 18:32, 7 February 2020 (UTC)