Template talk:Contradictory inline

Is that correct?
I can't figure out how to get the title of the article to show up. If I want to show that something mentioned in just one sentence contradicts something said in another article, how do I do that? When I try it, I get no matter how I try to amend it to include the title of the article in question. Help! Aristophanes68 (talk) 19:06, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Much belated reply, but the title of the article appears as a mouseover, as the tag links there. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 10:43, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Mobile version broken?
If I clock on this tag in the desktop version of an article, then it sends me to the other article that it us marked as contradicting. But if I tap this tag in the mobile version, it just pops a panel at the bottom of the screen that says &#8220;Citation: contradictory.&#8221; Bwrs (talk) 16:14, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Template talk:Contradict which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 14:14, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Article parameter
The "article=" parameter doesn't work. For instance, the example in the template document is: "The Eiffel Tower has been London's best known attraction for over a hundred years.." When you mouse over it, it says "This text contradicts text in the article Contradict-inline". It should say it contradicts the Paris article, as explained in the template document, and also because of the common-sense meaning of "article=Paris". This bug also occurs in real articles, such as Arabic (the first article listed at "What links here"). Art LaPella (talk) 22:52, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I saw in Arabic that the parameter refers back to the page it is on. Let's see what can be done about this. Debresser (talk) 13:56, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Debresser (talk) 14:18, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
 * You didn't fix it, you reverted it to previous poor state that produced redundant output. It was obviously using a magicword from the old code instead of the intended variable in the new code. I've fixed it. It now produces sane output if not given a parameter. It will also accept that as an unnamed parameter, since there was no reason to force it to be named.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:48, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Feature merge and improvement
Since this template produced nonsensical output if not given a parameter, and the only sensible output for no parameter would be to refer to the present article and categorize as self-contradictory not as contradictory with another article, I've merged the features of Template:Contradiction inline into this template, and added several additional ones to provide more helpful indications of whether the conflict is, e.g. with a section parameter. The template now categorizes and describes things correctly, and can handle all of the following cases: I will now redirect Contradiction inline to this template, since it handles all of that template's behaviors much better than it did before the feature merge and expansion. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:41, 1 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Used on an article to indicate conflict with the rest of the article, with correct category
 * Used on an article to indicate conflict with a specific section in the same article, with same category as above
 * Used on an article to indicate conflict with another article (giving a specific section or not), with a different correct category
 * Used on an article to indicate conflict with material not in an article (e.g. sources under discussion on the talk page), without categorization
 * Used on a non-article, to indicate any of the above, and without categorization.
 * Used in any of the above ways with a reason explaining the nature of the conflict (does not affect categorization)

Behavior of the 'reason' parameter
changed the behavior of reason to of the mouse-over tooltip, on the basis "Use reason as usually done on maintenance templates". But this is not usual behavior at all, it's highly unusual, unexpected, and liable to produce unintended and unhelpful output. I would know, since I'm the one who introduced the convention of using reason as the default "add a note for editors about why this tag is even here" mechanism for templates, a silent parameter (no code making it actually do anything) unless used to provide information. While there are non-maintenance templates, e.g. {{subst:Rm}}, that use this parameter to generate the bulk of their output, this is definitely not what editors expect when using cleanup and dispute templates. Usually the reason parameter does nothing but provide a comment mechanism that is less messy than inserting an HTML comment. At most, it should this reason to the tooltip.

I'm going through Category:Inline templates and its subcats, and so far have not found a single template that behaves found only a tiny number of templates that behave the way Debresser wants this one to. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:55, 2 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Update: I've done some digging around in template code of comparable inline templates. Virtually all of the hundreds of these templates use reason as a silent parameter, an alternative to HTML comments, and many are documented this way explicitly, as at Disputed inline, Relevance inline, Third-party inline, Undue inline, etc.  The following are the only ones that do what Debresser is proposing here: Importance inline, Bare URL inline, Update inline, Primary source inline, Tertiary source inline, Citation needed, Copy edit inline, Unreliable source, and Clarify (where this was not at all the intended behavior; someone changed it here), and same at Clarify span and Update inline, which now produce unhelpful output as a result (see below). Several of the others were probably also changed later, without any regard to whether their output would be sensible. All of these need to be repaired to  the reason material, not use it as a replacement.  See Incomprehensible inline, Tertiary source inline, Awkward, and Copy edit inline for good examples of how to do this. This additive approach is standard in cleanup/dispute templates more generally; see, as just a handful of examples: Cleanup and all it's derived templates (cleanup section, etc.), similar but non-derived templates like Cleanup school, Cleanup image, and many others such as Expand section, Expert needed, Incomplete, Copy edit, etc., etc.  Many also use the parameter silently without affecting output, and are documented as doing so, e.g. Refimprove, Split portions, etc.  Various non-mainspace templates have adopted these usage patterns, either producing additional (not replacement) output, e.g. Moved discussion to and Wrong venue, or using the parameter silently.  Use of reason as a total replacement for default template output is very rare, aside from the above cases, and used only when the default text is considered to be a bare minimum to even identify the issue at all, as at db-g6.

— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:59, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
 * People should not be randomly replacing with idiosyncratic messages that may be context-specific, and not identify the policy problem being tagged in the first place. This problem is especially obvious with Citation needed, a template for flagging a specific core content policy failure, which now can be rendered as ridiculous even insulting noise in an article, to bite new editors instead of help them improve their work: .  Update inline provides another clear example of why this is a terrible idea. Here's the standard output: ; here's one of innumerable possible stupid results when reason is made to behave in this non-standardized manner:  (I didn't make that example up – I pulled it directly from Template:Update inline/testcases, and some of the examples in the documentation will also produce unhelpful, confusing results, e.g..


 * PS: An additional reason to use the parameter in an additive way is that it is used for cleanup categories Category:Cleanup tagged articles with a reason field and Category:Cleanup tagged articles without a reason field. Those with reasons are likely to be addressed more quickly than those which do not, so basically we want people to add reasons. They will not do this if the reason parameter is being abused as an alternative wording parameter. In a similar vein, instances of Expert needed that have neither reason nor talk may be removed.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:09, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Section linking broken?
Even the examples on this page don't properly link to a #section of the article. Tofof (talk) 22:18, 18 May 2019 (UTC) produces: produces: produces:
 * Which examples? What are they supposed to link to, where do they actually go? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 23:24, 18 May 2019 (UTC)
 * These two:
 * The code:
 * The code:
 * Both should go to Dove (note that Dove redirects to Columbidae now). The first link goes to Category:Articles contradicting other articles instead and the second link goes to Dove and fails to jump to the section (which still exists under the same name). I found that the only way to link to a section on a different article is the following:
 * The code:
 * Clearly, the template is buggy. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:29, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It appears that in March-April 2016, and  worked on merging  but there was some disagreement. I suspect that the template and its doc became out of synch, I don't know which is supposed to be correct. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:47, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The feature works in the sandbox version. See Template:Contradict-inline/sandbox.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:51, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Have you actually clicked the links in question? (The link preview feature of my browser indicates where I'll land, so I don't even have to click.) At least in my own browser, it doesn't work; instead it works as I have described. (I tested it both in Firefox and Opera.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:05, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Is that before or after my edit from yesterday? Debresser (talk) 20:36, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Now it's even worse, unfortunately. All links point to the category, except the ones with "article=Dove", which point to the article "Dove", but no section link. My own variant, with "article=Dove#Domestication", links to the section correctly, though. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:47, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I just noticed that the problem persists, by the way. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:07, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Obviously. There is no link to sections. Let's see what we can do about that. Debresser (talk) 22:17, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Please check. Should be fixed now. Debresser (talk) 22:37, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your effort; this fixes some links but breaks others. In the example section, examples 5 and 8 now work correctly, but all the other examples simply redirect to the category now ... --Florian Blaschke (talk) 11:58, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It took a lot of trial and error, but it worked in the end. All fixed now. Debresser (talk) 01:38, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

"about" parameter
This tag uses "reason" for a textual description of the problem. The main self-contradictory tag uses "about". I suggest this tag should also support "about" as a synonym for "reason" so that editors don't have to mangle existing tags to move from inline to section or back.

Additionally, I would suggest the "about/reason" is the single most important part of this tag. Yet this text does not appear in the resulting page. This, to me, is a major oversight.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:43, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Broken with explicit "article" parameter and no "section" parameter
Error case found "in the wild" at Phi: The issue goes away when the explicit  is removed, or if a   parameter (even an empty one) is added. -- Perey (talk) 15:31, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Invocation:
 * Result as of this writing: [contradictory]
 * Result as you're reading this:


 * Same problem with the "page" parameter. Debresser (talk) 19:50, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Links to wrong category as of March 2024
I've just used this in the Dabenarti article, with, and clicking it takes me to articles which contradict other articles, not ones which contradict themselves. Musiconeologist (talk) 12:21, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
 * You are right. Fixed. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 18:49, 30 March 2024 (UTC)