Template talk:Crossreference

Unprintworthy?
SMcCandlish, why would uses of this template to link other article material be considered unprintworthy Wikipedia self-references? What I read from Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid is that articles should not say, "For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Foo." But it should be fine to use, "See also Foo." The MOS page (probably updated later than the template documentation) actually recommends using this template for these permissible cases, which are not considered self-references. --Paul_012 (talk) 17:50, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * They self-references. Saying "permissible cases, which are not considered self-references" is confused; there are permissible self-references and not-permissible ones; being a permissible selfref doesn't make it a non-selfref, and being a permissible one doesn't make it printworthy. For WP:REUSE reasons, every article's content should make sense as a stand-alone piece. This is why disambiguation hatnotes, templates like, navbars, categories, GA/FA badges, protection notices, cleanup/dispute templates, etc., are all unprintworthy (explicitly or by cascade). If you generate a printed version of the article (through our feature for that, not just from doing File &gt; Print from your browser) these features should not appear in the end result (unless you force them to by turning off "Hide interface elements").  When you do " " in an article, that is a reference to other content somewhere else that is not part of the article content and which will not make sense or be usable if the article content is reused in some other context, like as part of a book chapter.  By contrast, a " " is in the same article's content and is printworthy, and this is why this template supports n AKA y AKA n.  I'm glad you raised this question, though. I had not looked at the "Print/export: Print page" output in a long time, and I can see something right up top – the "(Wikidata &middot; Import &middot; Edit and import)" stuff that's part of the short description output – that has been improperly made printworthy but should not be.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:30, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification and explanation. But doesn't that mean all "See also" foot sections, and, come to think of it, any use of wikilinks, for that matter, would also be unprintworthy, since they link elsewhere outside of the article? Wikilinks are obviously underlined by the print function, and it was my understanding that this is analogous to book encyclopedias, where cross-references are often made to other entries, so they're considered printworthy. I don't quite see why "See also Foo" should be treated differently from a simple wikilink to "Foo", in terms of printability. --Paul_012 (talk) 20:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * You're still making a confusing argument. "Printworthy" is a WP concept that has only to do with generating paper or other non-WP output from our article material.  Cross-referencing in other, print-based encyclopedias doesn't relate in any way to our concept of printworthiness.  WP printworthiness is about display of a span, div, or other element (does it appear at all, or is it suppressed?) in particular use cases.  If someone wanted to fine-tune their reuse of our content, they would need to do additional style-related work (e.g. suppressing underlines, removing text coloration, etc.).  That is, we don't seem to be doing everything possible on our end to "scrub" content for reuse; we're only doing what we've gotten around to doing so far, if I may be tautological about it.  The entire class of hatnote templates, including ones we use more for footnotes (like ) are unprintworthy, as trans-article cross-references; they're all produced by the template/module for hatnotes, which uses the   class, one of several for unprintworthiness. As for "See also" as a section, it probably should be treated as unprintworthy, but I don't know if we have code in place doing this already. It probably  be done, since that is one of the few sections with an invariant name (the other being "Further reading", which properly should have complete enough references they could be of use to a paper [or otherwise off-site] reader, and so is arguably printworthy). Like everything else on WP, the printworthiness systemics are something built over time and probably perpetually incomplete.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:29, 20 May 2020 (UTC)