User:InfiniteNexus/citations

A guide to best practices when it comes to formatting citations. The contents of this page have neither been endorsed nor vetted by the community, and are not to be taken as guidelines or policies.

Cite web, news, and magazine
For consistency, all citations using Cite web, Cite news, or Cite magazine should follow the same parameter order, as illustrated below. This is adapted from the order used by the ProveIt gadget when normalizing Cite web citations.

For most sources:

Additional parameters:

Other templates
Other citation templates should follow a similar order, as illustrated below:

For Cite journal:

For Cite arXiv:

For Cite press release:

For Cite tweet:

For Cite Instagram:

For Cite AV media:

For Cite episode:

For Cite book:

For Cite podcast:

Choosing a template
For the vast majority of news articles and webpages online, Cite web will be the go-to template for citing them.

As established by an RfC in 2022, online articles published by newspapers (such as The New York Times and The Washington Post) and news agencies (such as CNN and the BBC) should use Cite news, while online articles published by magazines (such as Time and Vanity Fair) should use Cite magazine. An easy way to determine whether a publication is considered a newspaper or magazine is by looking at the first sentence of its Wikipedia article.

If a source is covered by a specific-source template such as one listed above, those should be used instead of Cite web.

Authors
If there is one credited author, use. If the author has a Wikipedia article, append the string with

If there is more than one credited author, use  and so forth. If the author(s) have Wikipedia articles, append each string with,  , and so forth.

If there is no credited author, use  instead of. If there is no byline, omit the string outright.

Date
For articles written in American English, use the month–day–year (MDY) format for date; for articles written in British English, use the day–month–year (DMY) format for date. The date should be spelled out in words and in full, not numerically or abbreviated.

The publication date should use the time zone in which the publication is based in — for example, Pacific Time (PT) or Eastern Time (ET) for American publications. Sometimes, a source displays a publication date and time that has been adjusted to match your time zone. If you are not located in the time zone of the publication, check to see if the date is noted in the source's URL. If not, you may have to manually convert time zones. If no time is given, you're out of luck; just go with the date you see and hope for the best.

Title
The source's title in its original language should be used in date. If there is no title on the webpage itself, use the title shown on the browser tab header while omitting the publication name.

Per MOS:CONFORMTITLE, source titles should be adjusted to comply with Wikipedia's Manual of Style. In particular, quotation marks should be replaced by italics for title of works, while hyphens should be replaced by en dashes where appropriate. Do not correct misspellings; use instead — the sic template is not suitable in this case either.

If the source is not in English, append the string with trans-title. Google Translate may be used to obtain an English translation of the title, but be sure to correct any obvious gramatical errors.

URL
For url, use HTTPS instead of HTTP, unless the webpage does not support HTTPS and would otherwise be rendered inaccessible.

If the source has a soft paywall, append the string with limited. If the source has a hard paywall, append the string with subscription. If the source requires the creation of a free account in order to access it, append the string with registration. A list of commonly used sources with soft and hard paywalls can be found url-access=|here.

Archive
It is good practice to enclose an archived copy of the source, even if it is a live link. However, if the source is constantly changing by the minute (such as Rotten Tomatoes), or if the webpage is essentially inaccessible when viewed as an archived copy (such as a streaming service), it would not be helpful to enclose an archive. Append cbignore to the end of the citation template to prevent bots from attempting to add an archive in the future.

If the source is live, use live. If the source cannot be accessed, use dead. If the source can technically be accessed, but the content being cited can no longer be found, use deviated. If the source's domain has changed owners, use usurped.

Copy-and-paste the earliest working archived copy of the source from the Wayback Machine onto archive-url. For Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and The Times articles, it is possible but exceedingly difficult to find a working archived copy on the Wayback Machine; if none can be found, use archive.today instead, but only as a last resort.

For archive-date, use the same formatting used in date. The date displayed on the Wayback Machine, which is set to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), should be used instead of a local time zone.

Access date
For archive-date, use the same formatting used in date. The time zone used should be set to UTC, which is the time zone used on Wikipedia and thus reflected in the page history. If an access date is missing and needs to be added retroactively, WikiBlame may be used to locate the date the text was added; if not, use the current date.

Work
In general, the generic work should be avoided.
 * For Cite web, use website if the publication is normally italicized (such as Business Insider and Deadline Hollywood) and publisher if the publication is not normally italicized (such as Bloomberg News and Yahoo! News).
 * For Cite news, use newspaper for newspapers (such as The New York Times and The Washington Post); use publisher for both news agencies (such as CNN and the BBC) and wire agencies (such as Reuters and the Associated Press). Do not use agency.
 * For Cite magazine, use magazine.

A list of commonly used sources that should not be italicized and should thus use publisher can be found publisher=|here. If the publication is not a news organization but rather a company or organization, use publisher by default. If the publication "lives" on a parent website (such as Total Film–GamesRadar+ and io9–Gizmodo), the authorial publication should use website in conjunction with the parent publication using publisher.

Citation bot may sometimes behave irrationally and attempt to make a bad change to this parameter. When this occurs, append cbignore to the end of the citation template to prevent it from continuing to do so.

Other optional parameters
If the publication is a newspaper whose ISSN is widely used, include the ISSN in issn. A list of commonly used sources with ISSNs can be found here.

If the source is not in English and trans-title was used above, the foreign language of the source should be noted in lang in abbreviated form. See WP:LANGCODE for a list of supported language codes.

If the claim is potentially or evidently controversial, it may be beneficial to include a quoted portion of the relevant text in quote. However, this will not work if the multiple passages of the same reference is being used on the article.

At the end of the template, append cbignore to prevent bots from modifying the reference. Alternatively and more aggressively, bots may be placed near the top of the article to prevent bots from modifying references on the article. If the source is a lengthy PDF, append rp to the end of the template to indicate the page number being cited.