Template talk:LDS

Switch?
It would be useful if you didn't have to enter the book twice, manually determining the abbreviation. This could probably be accomplished with a switch statement on the book name. Superm401 - Talk 04:13, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

How to use template across chapters?
It doesn't appear that anyone thought you would need to quote across chapters when setting this up, can it be modified to be able to do that? I needed to quote a block of scripture 1 Nephi 4:38-5:14, but couldn't using this template. Can this be addressed? Twunchy (talk) 20:00, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Additional discussions
Additional discussions about this template, which may be useful in understanding it, exist in the following locations: Thanks. — Asterisk *  Splat → 18:58, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/Archive 10
 * Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/Archive 11

Update to use Gospel Library online links?
These would be links like https://churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/ot/gen/11.26,31 — Damenleeturks (talk) 20:11, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Adding Alternate Sources (and other wish list items)
This template got flagged for potential deletion (or merger with Bibleverse), and while I strongly oppose either of those possibilities I agree that there are potential issues with linking to the LDS church's website, including the potential for link rot and the non-neutral POV of the site (not in a bad way—I'm active LDS—but it is a thing). Then again the LDS website has tons of great resources like cross-references and the ability to easily highlight verses, so I'm not saying the template should necessarily only link to Wikisource either. This post is meant to start some discussion/brainstorming about possible improvements (or, more likely, just a place for me to type out loud to myself).

Wish List
In an ideal world, I would want the following:


 * The template should have a simple format for basic LDS scripture citations that beginner editors can use easily
 * The existing format does this well I think, but I'm listing it here since I think it's critical that it stay that way no matter how it is changed
 * There would be an option to link to different sources for the scriptures cited, a la Bibleverse.
 * I wold vote for ChurchOfJesusChrist.org to be the default if no source is specified (though I'm open to arguments that it should be something else).
 * Wikisource seems like the obvious next choice to implement (the Bibleverse template could be leveraged for citations to the KJV Old and New Testaments on Wikisource, for example).
 * A few other possibilities come to mind too, though citing to individual books (let alone verses) within these sources would probably require complicated (and brittle) logic:
 * Joseph Smith Papers Project
 * Project Gutenberg
 * Archive.org
 * Any other reliable sources hosting LDS scriptures with free/open access (I wish Book of Mormon Central's ScripturePlus resource weren't app-only . . .)
 * The template should gracefully handle the inclusion of optional parameters that aren't supported by certain sources (I guess just by ignoring them?).
 * Since sources besides the LDS website would be supported, specific editions of the scriptures could also be permitted (e.g., the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Commandments
 * Not all of these have verses, and some of the chapter breaks in early editions of the Book of Mormon are different than the modern ones. How should these be handled? Ideally the citation displayed to a user would indicate that a link to Helaman Chapter 2 is to that chapter as it was listed in the 1830 edition (or 1841, or whatever), but not sure how to do that, let alone make it look good.
 * The template would allow users to cite to other LDS Movement denominations' scriptures, such as the Community of Christ ( and (unofficial source)) and the Remnant movement.
 * This is probably outside the scope of what a single template should do, but I wanted to toss it out just in case.

Any other functionality that would be great to see? Just throwing out any idea that sounds cool, and figuring out later if/when/how to implement them can come later.

Feasibility
I'd describe myself as an intermediate-skilled Wikipedia user who has done virtually no work on templates before, so I have no idea how hard those things would be to implement, how resilient to future changes they would be, whether any of these things have been discussed and voted down before, or the most efficient way to implement these changes without breaking anything on pages that already use the template (or only breaking things in ways that can easily and quickly be fixed). But I also feel comfortable enough in my ability to learn the template-specific MediaWiki markup to make at least some of these changes and would be willing to put in the time to help out with them.

Any thoughts on these ideas? Are they feasible? Are they even worth putting effort into, or are most people perfectly happy with links to the official online LDS scriptures?

Next steps
I'll start looking into what it would take to implement an option for linking to WikiSource and whether any of these changes can be made without affecting the current usage of the template. I don't think this template gets much traffic so I know it's entirely possible I'm completely talking into the wind here (though maybe that big "considered for deletion" notice next to every use of it will get people's attention like it did mine). Happy to hear anyone else's thoughts. biggins (talk) 08:36, 22 July 2020 (UTC)


 * It was me who put up the recommendation for deletion, but time has made me wiser, and I agree with you that modifying the template to point to WikiSource would be a better scenario over deletion, but I strongly feel that the current external source is POV and not appropriate for Wikipedia. There was a lot of debate for the sites allowed for the BibleVerse template that they needed to be non-denominational.  I'll be honest, I am not that solid on templates.  I spent a bit of time trying to do this but was unsuccessful. Any help would be much appreciated. Epachamo (talk) 13:26, 22 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Good to know about the debate about sites allowed for the BibleVerse template, I will take a look at that on its talk page. Over on the templates for discussion entry, mentioned that there are some volunteers who help with editing templates, so hopefully we can rely on expert help for the changes. What would you think about the template allowing for linking to either Wikisource or the LDS Church's website? Based on the discussion at the Bibleverse, I think I'll amend my vote above for the LDS Church website to be the default and agree that Wikisource is probably better, but I can see why people might still want to cite to the LDS Church's site specifically, including
 * - For the official official text (e.g., the PoGP on Wikisource has the slightly older version of the Articles of Faith, with "viz." instead of "namely" and lacking the in-text gloss of "Zion (the New Jerusalem)" that was added later, and while I don't think the 2013 online edition of the LDS Scriptures makes any changes to the text from the 1981 version on Wikisource and is limited instead to chapter introductions etc, I'm not sure about that and linking to the LDS Church's website guarantees the absolute most authoritative version);
 * - To include the LDS Church's cross-references for help understanding how the church interprets its own scriptures; and
 * - Just being able to highlight (even non-consecutive) verses :)
 * Thanks for the response! ― biggins (talk) 15:57, 23 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I do think there might be instances where linking to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scriptures website would be useful, but only when specifically referring to viewpoints of that specific denomination within the Latter Day Saint movement. Those instances are rare enough that I'd have serious concerns over making it the default.
 * - "official text": official according to whom? When?  Maybe we can add the correct version of the PoGP to Wikisource?
 * - "Cross-references": The NPOV references can be added to Wikisource. Adding them to Wikisource is the preferable solution IMO.
 * - "highlighting verses": I think this can be done with templates? Epachamo (talk) 16:43, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't be too difficult to add Wikisource support. I think what LDS page corresponds to which Wikisource page is quite well established at the TfD so that shouldn't be an issue either. There were a lot of other suggested features that may or may not be a good idea and I won't touch those before there is a consensus for them. I don't think it's feasible to get verse highlighting on Wikisource, and if it's possible some major changes over there would be required. I think Wikisource should be the default with a parameter such as yes being used to toggle to the LDS version mostly based on the TfD and the NPOV concerns over linking to an denominational page when there are viable alternatives. --Trialpears (talk) 20:07, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Using the Template's Sandbox to Work on Wikisource Migration
I am starting to tinker around with the LDS/sandbox template and I don't think it should be a big problem to migrate everything to Wikisource. There are a few issues to think through, though, and if anyone is interested in chiming in on them I put them on the sandbox template's talk page. ― biggins (talk) 17:37, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Proposal: Migrate to Wikisource as Default Source
Per the recent discussion on this template's TfD entry, I propose that we update the template to link to Wikisource by default as it would fit better with Wikipedia's neutrality policy. Since the template is used to cite the text of LDS scriptures, it seems to me to be much preferable to use a Wikipedia sister project that hosts those texts.

I'm sure the (vast?) majority of uses of LDS are in the context of discussions about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but regardless I think a more neutral source than the CoCJ's website is desirable. And using Wikisource would be even more important when discussing the scriptural interpretations of other denominations in the Latter Day Saint movement, or when identifying criticisms of the CoJCoLDS (I doubt that critics would like to link to a website that is chock-full of resources defending their opponents' positions). In short, I think that the template would be more in line with Wikipedia's values, and of more value to a wider variety of Wikipedians, if it used Wikisource as its default source.

For one point of comparison, Wikipedians have been discussing how best to handle Bible citations for well over a decade—see the Bibleverse template's archived talk page and Citing sources/Bible—and avoiding/minimizing denominational favoritism is a common thread.

Draft Replacement
To help see how this might look in practice, I've created a draft replacement template currently stored in LDS/sandbox that links to the LDS scriptures on Wikisource by default (with an optional "website=lds" parameter for situations where citing to the LDS Church website might be appropriate or necessary). In order to ensure backwards compatibility with the current LDS template, the new version accepts all the same parameters so it should be seamless to simply update the template's code without breaking anything. (If you're interested in the technical details, most of the actual logic is done in a Lua module, currently stored at Module:, which allows for much cleaner and easier-to-maintain code than doing everything in a template directly; this approach was inspired by Bibleverse.)

If this proposal is accepted, we could simply copy the code from LDS/sandbox into LDS and move the module out of the Sandbox area and rename it Module:LDSverse (or similar).

Comparison
Here's a chart highlighting some of the new template's miscellaneous features and improvements from the current version of the template:

You can also see how the template+module handle a bunch of test cases here.

Replacement Status
I'd categorize the LDS/sandbox template as being in the alpha stage, with the only outstanding issues remaining to implement being:


 * Links to chapters (without specific verses) in the Pearl of Great Price (e.g., ) don't work yet since the PoGP page on Wikisource treats chapter bookmarks weirdly. (But links to specific PoGP verses, like, do work fine.)
 * No support yet for citing to the or the testimonies of the  or  Witnesses.

Other than those issues I'm hopeful that it works pretty much as well as the current version. Please test it out and let me know if you see anything else wrong or have any suggestions for improvements, though!


 * Note: Citing to Official Declaration 2 via the new template since it is still copyrighted so it can't be hosted on Wikisource. Also, the current version of the template (sort of) allows for citations to the JST materials in the LDS scriptures' appendices (e.g., )—I say "sort of" because they all just result in a link to the Joseph Smith Translation Appendix in the Study Helps section of the website—but since those haven't actually been canonized I don't plan to support them.

Flexibility
Also of note, Wikisource has the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon as well as the Book of Commandments from 1833, which could thus relatively easily be added to this revised template in the future if desired to help with scriptural citations in historical contexts. And if we ever wanted to go really crazy and offer options to cite to, say, the JS Papers Project website for the various editions of the Book of Mormon or Book of Commandments/Doctrine and Covenants published during Joseph Smith's lifetime, with their hi-res image scans and top-notch scholarly transcriptions, we would definitely want to implement that in a Lua module like the new version of the template does.

I'm not at all sure the juice would be worth the squeeze on any of those, tbh, but it's worth mentioning that this approach allows for much more flexibility going forward, I think.

Feedback
What do people think of this proposal? For or against? Questions or concerns?

To be clear, I'm not saying that the LDS/sandbox version of the template is ready to replace the current version of this template immediately, but I do want to see if we can get consensus to migrate to using Wikisource by default. If so, I can work on polishing the new version of the template (including improving its documentation) so that it is ready to swap in. ― biggins (talk) 09:28, 2 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Support - I concur with all of the above. This is great stuff and a lot of good work! Epachamo (talk) 17:06, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Sounds good! Tell me if you need help with the template stuff and I'll see what I can do. --Trialpears (talk) 17:20, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support nice work so far. -- Green  C  23:50, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support And please let me know if you need someone to facilitate anything over on the Wikisource side of things biggins. --Xover (talk) 08:36, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
 * thank you, I will probably take you up on that! ― biggins (talk) 15:12, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Update: The basic functionality of the LDS/sandbox template is now all working—many thanks to for greatly speeding up the resolution of the Wikisource-specific issues I was having!—so I updated the Module: rating from alpha to beta. Based on my limited-but-hopefully-representative testing, all links should be going to the right places. I will next test out random pages that use the current LDS template to ensure that using the LDS/sandbox code would not break any functionality. If anyone else cares to play around with LDS/sandbox and sees any problems or has any feedback, it would be most welcome! On a logistical note, I don't have any experience with generating consensus to replace a template, but would, say, two weeks from today be a reasonable period to wait to put the new template into "production" if there isn't any opposition (and no significant bugs are found)? ― biggins (talk) 21:26, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikisource migration complete
There being no objection, and a few expressions of support, I have completed the migration to Wikisource discussed in the previous sections above. Hopefully the transition has not caused any issues: I created a number of test cases that all pass and I spot-checked a whole bunch of the pages that use this template and so far I haven't seen any problems, but feel free to message/tag/alert me if you see anything that needs fixing or updating or whatever and you can't figure it out yourself. The gist is that there's now a new optional parameter that can be used to link to the CoJCoLDS website (just include "website=lds" anywhere in the template), in which case a snapshot of the previous version of the template will be invoked (Template:LDS/legacy) and otherwise the template will call the module which is able to handle all the appropriate logic in a much cleaner and more maintainable format than implementing it all in the template directly.

The last thing that I hope to do is flesh out the documentation page a bit more, but hopefully it explains the basic usage well enough as is. ― biggins (talk) 01:51, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Clean up needed
Following recent changes to lds, the following articles are displaying "Lua error in Module:LDSverse". That may be due to broken wikitext in these articles and I'm hoping someone will fix them. Johnuniq (talk) 07:36, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Anthon Transcript
 * Black people and early Mormonism
 * Criticism of the Book of Mormon
 * Ether (Book of Mormon prophet)
 * Sign of the Dove


 * I have fixed the errors in the articles mentioned. Do you know if there is a place that lists all Lua errors? Epachamo (talk) 15:01, 22 August 2020 (UTC)


 * that was a great question so I did some digging, and Johnuniq and a few other very helpful editors were able to point out some great resources in this discussion. The most direct answer to your question is that yes, this link shows exactly which pages are throwing errors from the LDS template! Fortunately (as of my typing this) there aren't any, but I'll try to keep an eye on it going forward. I also should handle errors better in the module, and I think it shouldn't be too hard to actually catch the easiest error to make (forgetting to "repeat" a book name, e.g., ), so hopefully the issue will get even smaller in the future. ― biggins (talk) 13:48, 27 August 2020 (UTC)