Wikipedia talk:Citation templates/Archive 5

Archives: Sep 2008 - Current

Template for patent citation....
based on the application number and publication number ????

Can it be available for wiki contributor in the future??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.190.192.130 (talk) 03:35, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Try Patent, Cite patent, and US patent.--Srleffler (talk) 04:09, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Machine translation field
I propose adding a "machine translation" field to the cite web template for non-English websites. SharkD (talk) 06:03, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
 * What exactly would it contain? --Adoniscik(t, c) 22:25, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd presume, parameters to generate a link to a machine-translated copy. For example,
 * might generate something like:
 * 产品介绍 ("Product Introduction").&#32;Retrieved on 2008-08-22; (hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en &u=http://www.babyeinstein.com/cn/OurProducts.shtml automated translation)
 * yielding:
 * 产品介绍 ("Product Introduction").&#32;Retrieved on 2008-08-22; (automated translation)
 * TJRC (talk) 04:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * This user also made the proposal over at Template talk:Cite web, where it was not received with enthusiasm. The gist of the negative opinions (mine included) was that citations must be to references actually used, not to translations of them. RossPatterson (talk) 01:14, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
 * This user also made the proposal over at Template talk:Cite web, where it was not received with enthusiasm. The gist of the negative opinions (mine included) was that citations must be to references actually used, not to translations of them. RossPatterson (talk) 01:14, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

citing a book more than once
I frequently find myself wanting to use a book as a citation for than once for the same article. (You know - books - they're like the internet except printed on dead trees and with a really crappy search function). I'm a huge fan of resuing refs with the tag, but the problem is I also want to be as specific as possible in my ref, and that means inserting the page number. I don't want to redo the entire ref again because that just seems like a waste of space and not a very robust solution (reinventing the wheel and all that), but I don't see a better way of doing it. Is there anything in place (or could something developed) that would allow this to happen? For example, I could do and then later when I wanted to cite a different page in the same book do something like. --Bachrach44 (talk) 03:05, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
 * The way to do what you want would be to do  --Lightsup55 ( T | C ) 03:28, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
 * That is one way. See Citing sources/Example edits for different methods for some others. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 04:07, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Template:Rp puts the page number after the footnote.[1] Alternatively, you can use tags to do the same thing. American Medical Association style doesn't use the basic colon number, but instead does it like this [1](p10) or like this.[2](pp20)

How is using that affected when you bring in other book references? LamontCranston (talk) 08:59, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Anthologies/compendiums
I notice that User:Fainites has mentioned this before (Another template please), but he got no response. When dealing with scholarly works that are edited collections of essays by various authors - anthologies or compendiums if you like - there is no template that fully allows this. The template covers this, by distinguishing between "contribution" and "title", and by allowing for editors to be listed. But there should also be the option of doing this with, preferably. I'd include these parameters myself, but I'm not exactly sure how, or if it would require talk page consensus. Lampman (talk) 14:31, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok, at closer scrutiny I realised there's the possibility to use "chapter". Maybe this should be included on the template as it's presented here though. I also realise now that there's room for editors, but only one space even if there are multiple editors. Lampman (talk) 14:43, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
 * cite book also works, again using the "chapter" field for the name of the chapter (or article or paper). You can put as many editors as needed into the "editors" field.--Srleffler (talk) 04:12, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I have also not found it possible to reference a chapter in a historical primary source (many works use internal numbering such as ch. 34.9 to refer to specific paragraphs.) The closest match for this is the chapter tag mentioned above, but since it's meant to be used for headings it encloses it in inverted commas ("34.9") which is incorrect I think. fluoronaut (talk) 09:13, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually looking at the template again I think is probably the way forward. Seems a bit clunky though. fluoronaut (talk) 09:20, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

{Cite xxx} vs {Citation}
Is there a good reason for having two incompatible families of citation templates? Many citation tools only offer output in one or the other family. So this means, for example, giving up either Zotero or the Universal reference formatter. To make matter worse, I'm not aware of any tool for converting between families. Can't we simply decide to use either commas or full stops for both? ·:· Will Beback ·:· 01:32, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
 * These two families produce different citation styles. For example, the {Cite xxx} family separates elements with a full stop, while the {Citation} template separates elements with a comma. Thus, these two families should not be mixed in the same article.
 * I agree that there should be a uniform style. I don't see the point of the two families in the first place and personally would purge the "cite xxx" series. But in any case, I think it's a really bad idea to have to sets of templates that produce different style for exactly the same thing being cited. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:54, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

How do you cite a newspaper article that has no link online?
Hello! I have sources from Newspaper articles, but the articles are old, so the links are not online. How would I cite the newspaper without the link to a URL? Thanks! CarpetCrawler (talk) 02:26, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Use cite news with the URL field blank. --Adoniscik(t, c) 02:29, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Ooh thank goodness! Thank you so much! :) CarpetCrawler (talk) 02:54, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Many newspapers, such as the Los Angles Times and the New York Times, have searchable archives. The archived articles generally require a fee, but the abstracts can be viewed without a fee. The Los Angeles Times archive can be found at http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/advancedsearch.html --Dan Dassow (talk) 12:38, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to merge templates
See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style‎. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 17:48, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

accessmonthday/accessyear
can we get this pairing of parameters functional in cite map, cite press release and cite book as well? I use these three templates frequently in writing articles, and I'd like to completely switch the references all over to be consistent. (One of the sources I use publishes their book online.) Imzadi1979 (talk) 04:49, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

citing titles with East-Asian titles
How do you site a page where the title is in an East-Asian language? Currently cite web doesn't support showing those characters as part of the title.Jinnai (talk) 07:56, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Can you be more specific as to which language? -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 14:45, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I am trying to cite Japanese, specifically hiragana characters for a title with cite web.Jinnai (talk) 03:37, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm...we do a lot of citing of Japanese sites in the anime/manga project, and I haven't heard of any problems using it. They all show up fine for the ones I've used. Is there a specific article I can look at to see what its doing for the one you're trying to cite or can you post an example here? -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 03:49, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Can't recall which one I was talking about before, but the 2 I still have in mind are |this page or the one on the top link I was planning to use as well as |this page for a product review. When i use Japanese for the titles it doesn't display properlyunder sources.Jinnai (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 04:56, 26 October 2008 (UTC).
 * Testing:


 * Mr Stephen (talk) 17:47, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, thanks alot, I didn't notice the others parameter. AngelFire3423 (talk) 18:42, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, thanks alot, I didn't notice the others parameter. AngelFire3423 (talk) 18:42, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Date formatting
The date delinking issue started late last year; in November, the date fields for all of the citation templateswere delinked, resulting in the removal of formatting. This left thousands of dates in ISO and other formats.

We now have a technical fix to format dates without linking by the use of the new magic word. Examples:

gives using your preferences. You can also set the style with:

This does work inside a ref tag:

Is there any consensus on getting this into the core and implementing in in the templates? ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 21:09, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * (Links are nice)
 * And what's the advantage of this new magical word   when compared to the template Date, or indeed to writing the desired date text by hand? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:07, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It honors the user date preference. Before November 2008, we had a technical way to format dates using linking that was embedded in the citation templates. After a long discussion on date linking, it was removed from all of the citation templates, leaving articles with all sorts of formats. Notably, accessdates in a lot of articles are in ISO format. Using either {{#formatdate:} or date, we can implement a technical fix to date formatting. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 09:36, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the explanation — appreciated. Do I understand correctly then that those two mechanisms are equivalent? Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:04, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Other than supporting user preferences, then yes. ---—  Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 12:33, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Is there going to be a bot that will insert this new magic word for every date in an article? Otherwise I'm not sure that I see it being much use. Alarics (talk) 14:00, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Since there is no consensus on updating the date format, then no. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 14:07, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Work to be done standardising templates
There is a lot to be done re standardising templates... many templates are missing some paramaters (eg. quote), others use some different syntax... ··gracefool&#9786; 02:02, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Indeed so, and also there seems to be confusion about what is meant by the "work" and "publisher" and "title" parameters in the "cite news" template. What I think we want is to put the title of the newspaper in italics (isn't that the convention?) and the title of the article in inverted commas. The latter works for the "title" parameter in both the "citation" and "cite news" templates, but "cite news" puts the name of the newspaper NOT in italics if you put it in "publisher". So I always put it in "work" instead, which does give italics. The "citation" template, however, has a parameter "newspaper" which does give italics (as shown in the example given). Does anyone know how to sort all this out? Alarics (talk) 10:45, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

ISSN (print vs. online)
Some publications have 2 ISSNs, one for the print version and one for online. It would be great if this was supported by Wikipedia. Here's an example publication that has both. Regional Monetary Integration in the Member States of the Gulf Cooperation Council

Rigimoni (talk) 07:18, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Availability of this page
This page should be readily available in the toolbox list of links on the left side of every page on this website. The reason this should be on that list, instead of other Wikipedia-related sections, is because citation is one of the most important parts of ANY type of reference. Add that to the fact that Wikipedia's citation template is one of the most unintuitive templates I've ever seen in my life, and it's a pain in the ass to have to type in "Wikipedia:Citation Templates" in the search bar and then wait for the page to load.Wikieditor1988 (talk) 06:30, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

press conferences
We need a template for press conferences. Kingturtle (talk) 18:44, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Question on How Multiple Urls Can Be Used in Citation
Does citing more than 1 url to be for the book is possible. Kasaalan (talk) 08:48, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You could say something like (See also [...], [...]).

Citing an author's chapter in an edited book
I am trying to find a straightforward way of citing an author of a chapter, notable because of his work in this area, in a collection of papers by various authors set out as chapters in a book. So, using Harvard this would be relatively straightforward, but I cannot figure out how to do this using either the citation or cite book templates. I do not want to cite the book or the editors, I want to cite the author and the chapter and page number in the context of the book and the editors. I have been scratching my head on this one and figured out a workaround, but it seems a bit untidy for something that is a no-brainer really. An example is:

Boswell, J. (1993). On the use of the term “homo” as a derogatory epithet. In M. Wolinsky & K. Sherrill (Eds.), Gays and the military: Joseph Steffan versus the United States (pp. 49-55). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Thanks. Mish (talk) 09:08, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

P.S. the suggestions using the book cite and citation template for books, or for journals, what I have done is adapted the way suggested for citing conferences using citation:

Is this the only way to do this Mish (talk) 09:38, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * What's wrong with:  which gives  Stephen Kirragetalk - contribs 10:42, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, that is similar to what I did - but it took a bit of figuring out, because this is not detailed on the project page. Would it be possible to put a section into the project page that spells this out - as the only reference to this is for conferences, and it might make it easier for others in the future to see how to do it straight away. Mish (talk) 10:52, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * You'll see that on the project page it says "Common usage", the implication being it's not supposed to be a comprehensive documentation of the Template (this is true of all the "Cite" examples here). The idea is you follow the Cite book (or Cite whatever) link on the project page where you will find a full documentation of the template (in this case including the  feature). Stephen Kirragetalk - contribs 17:17, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Duh! Silly me! Thanks - that makes sense. Mish (talk) 18:11, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Inline tag size
In doing some edits over the last few months, I've noticed that the inline tags for citations always cause the line on which they are located to push apart from the preceeding line, leading to an uneven pattern of line spacing that depends on the presence or absence of an inline tag in a line. This appears to be due only to the size of the inline tag. Is there any reason why the tags are the size that they are? I.e. is it possible to make them smaller? --Miesianiacal (talk) 12:34, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
 * What browser are you using? ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 20:46, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Microsoft Internet Explorer (on three different computers, all displaying the same phenomenon). -- Ħ   MIESIANIACAL  13:40, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Reusing a {cite book ...} ref with a different page number in the same article
I have a question that I have been unable to figure out from reading the CT article. How can I reuse the citation of a reference in the same article, only I need to refer to a totally different page number from the first time I used the citation? Is there any way to do this using the cite book citation technique? If so, where does it explain how to do this? I have noodled around with adding a page number to the standard reuse cite format (e.g., '' the first time and later in the article. One article I did had two books by the same author to the text in the reference there was "Barnett 2004, p. #" or "Barnett 2006, p. #" as appropriate with both books listed in the Works cited section. (see: U.S. Route 41 in Michigan for the exact usage) Imzadi1979 (talk) 20:27, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * This is the shortened footnotes system; see Citing sources. Note that you should use only one system in an article. See also rp for another method. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 20:35, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I had simply just reused the full cite book reference each time I used references from the books in that article, but that was deemed unacceptable at FAC during the review of the article. That's why it is as it is today. Imzadi1979 (talk) 00:37, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Imzadi1979 and Gadget850. I appreciate the quick responses! That is truly sad news to hear however. It seems two big reasons for Wikipedia articles not being better sourced is 1) the difficulty for any WP editor to learn the complexity of any single one of the multiple Wikipedia citation systems so that they can use it efficiently, and 2) the multiplicity of citation systems allowed, which means it is inevitable that any serious "citer" will run into the vastly different systems used in different articles. I have invested considerable time to learn the citation system, and am simply unwilling (as a volunteer editor) to duplicate the time in learning a second system. This is, of course, not true only of me. Thus many articles will either not be cited correctly (if the editor forswears citations because they don't know the syntax of the system used in a particular article) or will be a mismash (if they cite in the system they know). Is there an active forum on Wikipedia where such matters are discussed? I suspect this Talk Page is not the place to resolve it. Thanks again. N2e (talk) 22:34, 2 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Not understanding reference systems is no reason to not include references in an article. Quite frankly, it doesn't matter if the citation given is nothing but a URL or the title and author of a book, the fact that one is given is all that matters...who cares if a B-class article has a mishmash, so long as they are there. Someone else can clean it up later. Personally, I think this fact should be emphasized above all others on pages that explain how we cite on Wikipedia. Fewer people will be scared off by the admittedly intimidating citation systems we have here. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 05:54, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I had presumed that anyone who is here to discuss citation templates would already be familiar with Citing sources. The lead clearly states "Add your source even if you are unsure of how to properly format the citation—provide enough information to identify the source, and others will improve the formatting." The Citing sources talk page is probably the best place to discuss general issues. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:48, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * It's really not as complicated as it might seem at first. There really aren't that many ways to cite a source. The vast majority of editors have solved the problem of multiple page numbers using shortened footnotes. Note that you can mix shortened footnotes with full-citations-in-footnotes in the same article. CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:55, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Automating conversion
Many articles (for example, Birmingham Baths Committee) have a mix of citation templates and "raw text" references. Is there anyway to auto-magically convert the latter to the former, on a page-by-page basis? Or would somebody with the relevant skills like to consider making a tool to do so? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:22, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I share your desire to see these things standardised, but do bear in mind that many editors hate those citation templates and would rather have a tool which converts the former to the latter, rather than the other way round. Alarics (talk) 10:35, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm sure there are; there are Luddites in every walk of life. However, I'm not asking for a bot to convert citations across Wikipedia; just something to automate a task which I can otherwise carry out manually, in order to maintain consistency within individual articles; hence my deliberate use of on a page-by-page basis. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:38, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Would it at least be possible to always use the vertical format for the citation template (i.e. one field per line in the edit window) so that anyone editing it can more easily see what is going on. I think it is the "run-on" format for these things that people particularly dislike. Luddism has nothing to do with it; it is a matter of transparency. Alarics (talk) 15:21, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Then again, there's plenty of folk who would rather rip their eyes out than see the vertical formats lying around. If we can be patient, once the rev goes through for the reference definition thing we discussed here a short time ago, I think that will improve the situation for everyone tremendously. In any case, automated conversions of complex things like citations is probably not desired. The last thing we need is someone rapidly running through articles converting everything one way or another with a tool that doesn't quite get things right and we therefore wind up with tons of even more badly formatted refs. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 19:59, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

< Since there are a mixture of templates and hand written citations, it is unlikely that anyone would object to you adding citation templates for the ones that remain. However, it is polite and prudent to post on the the talk page first (i.e. "Does anyone mind if I ..."), then wait a week or more, then carry out the edit. CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:58, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Rereading your post, I realized we are all answering the wrong question. You were asking if there is a bot that automatically converts handwritten citations to citation templates. The answer is no, but there are bots that use only the ISBN, PMID or URL and ignore all the other information (which can potentially lead to ridiculous errors, if some editor has made a mistake with these numbers. So if you use these, check their output.) See User:Citation bot. CharlesGillingham (talk) 06:16, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, but I wasn't asking " if there is a bot that automatically converts handwritten citations to citation templates"; I was asking for a tool that I can use to semi-automate the otherwise-manual process of making such conversions on pages I'm already editing. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:07, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Here is how I use the bot manually.
 * Add  to your  . (Step by step instructions are at User:Citation_bot/use). This will add another set of tools to the left hand side of your screen called "reference formatting".
 * To replace a handwritten citation without too much effort, add . PMIDs and DOIs work as well.
 * Choose one of the reference formatting tools, like "Automatic (fast)".
 * The citation bot will edit the page, filling out the rest of the details of the citation.
 * Check the new citation against the original handwritten citation to be sure that this is the right source.
 * See User:Citation bot for more detail. CharlesGillingham (talk) 22:04, 17 August 2009 (UTC)


 * The problem with this is that, in practice, the Citation bot doesn't usually work. It has some daily limit, which has always been reached whenever I try it. -- Alarics (talk) 17:56, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Book citation when the work already has a Wikipedia article and it also needs a URL?
Using 'cite book', suppose we already have a Wikipedia article about the book being cited AND we want to include a URL. Is that possible? Normally the URL gets linked to the title. Yet if there is a Wiki article it gets linked to the title. This came up when I was trying to add a URL to an existing entry at Edward Said. EdJohnston (talk) 20:36, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Citation templates missing from the table
Comparing this guideline to, I noticed these templates are missing from the table:
 * Template:Cite DVD-notes
 * Template:Cite album-notes
 * Template:Cite arXiv
 * Template:Cite audio (a.k.a. Template:Cite video) (a.k.a. Template:Cite media)
 * Template:Cite interview
 * Template:Cite magazine (a.k.a. cite journal)
 * Template:Cite report
 * Template:Cite serial
 * Template:Cite speech
 * Template:Cite techreport
 * Template:Cite web APA

These aren't in the table, however, they probably should be merged or deprecated. Anyway, there's no rush to list them in the table.
 * Template:Cite science. Merge to Cite journal.
 * Template:Cite Sm. Does (almost) nothing, deprecate. Not really a citation template at all.
 * Template:Cite online journal. Merge to Cite journal.
 * Template:Cite manual. Merge to Cite book (already calls citation/core, so merge is trivial)
 * Template:Cite music release notes. Merge to Cite album notes.
 * Template:Cite podcast. Merge to Cite video.
 * Template:Cite visual. Merge to Cite video.

Templates which appear here, but aren't under
 * Template:Comic strip reference (not sure why. Tried to fix this and failed.)

Just FYI. Someday we should add these. CharlesGillingham (talk) 13:42, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Hansard template formatting
Can anyone help with this request to fix the formatting of the Hansard citation template? It would be much appreciated. Cordless Larry (talk) 23:46, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Work vs Publisher...?
The given example for the 'cite news' template indicates that the news entity (e.g. CNN, New York Times, etc.) should appear under the work field. This strikes me as odd; shouldn't this information be placed under the publisher field? If so, then what is the work field supposed to be used for? A quick review of featured content revealed that there is widespread confusion on this point. Wormcast (talk) 15:57, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

I just noticed some additional discussion (but no answers) on this; see also Work_to_be_done_standardising_templates -- Wormcast (talk) 16:05, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Since I wrote that last piece in the discussion you mention (to which nobody replied), I have discovered in the full documentation for "cite news", at Template:Cite news, that "publisher" is indeed not for the title of the organ but for its owning company, as it "may add credibility for local papers that are part of a family of publications like The McClatchy Company". It also turns out that the real name of the parameter for the title of the organ is "newspaper", which is certainly clearer than "work", but I suppose "work" is quicker to type. Either way - whether using parameter "newspaper" or parameter "work" - you get the title of the publication in italics, which is what we want.


 * I have pointed out to User:CharlesGillingham, who was last editing the project page, that the CNN example given is not very helpful and that the parameter "work" is not how it is described in the more detailed documentation, so it is all rather confusing. I hope he is going to do something about it, but if not I am tempted to change the page myself. - Alarics (talk) 19:10, 30 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the answers, Alarics. Wrt to the example, I say just change it! --Wormcast (talk) 20:22, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Note WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT. Work and publisher may or may not be the same thing. Note the following cites:

Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 00:03, 1 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I had already noted that "work" and "publisher" gave different results (mainly, that "work" puts the title in italics, which is how it should be), so I don't understand what point you are now making, Wtmitchell. As for the two examples you give, they seem to come out the same except that "retrieved" is capitalised in one and not the other, and one uses commas while the other uses full stops. (Differences which I'm sure most people would not even notice.) But in any case this is not an illustration of the difference between "work" and publisher"; you've used "work" in both examples, but used the "cite news" template for one and the "citation" template for the other. So I even less understand what point you are making with that. Actually I thought we were talking about "cite news". Isn't use of the "citation" template now deprecated anyway? Alarics (talk) 07:21, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

publication titles
It's usually common to italicize the names of publication titles (e.g. Time Magazine, New York Times, etc). However, the citation templates publication field is not automatically italicized by default. Wouldn't it make more sense to automatically italicize this? Dr. Cash (talk) 18:43, 1 September 2009 (UTC)


 * See the previous discussion. In the "cite news" template, the parameters "newspaper" and "work" do automatically italicise the name of the publication. The parameter "publisher" is not actually meant for the name of the publication, according to the documentation, and does not italicise it, as you rightly note. The problem is that many editors using these templates mistakenly think "publisher" means the name of the publication. In my view the best course would be to disable the "publisher" parameter altogether, since it is very rare that the name of the publisher (as distinct from the title of the publication) needs to be specified. -- Alarics (talk) 23:42, 1 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the parameter "newspaper" should just be changed to "publication" or "publication_title"; I use the cite news template for a lot more than just newspapers, and more and more, newspapers are dying as it is. I didn't even know that there was a "newspaper" parameter anyways -- probably because, when I use the little 'CITE' button at the top of the editing page that brings up the fields, there's a field for "publisher" but no field for "newspaper".


 * I think that, when citing, the name of the publication itself is an absolute must for putting in the citation. The specific name of the publisher (like the company that owns the publication) really isn't all that important. Dr. Cash (talk) 14:37, 2 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, as I said, the name of the publisher is very rarely needed. Much more important is the location (which unfortunately doesn't appear in many newspaper citations), since what is important is not (say) who publishes the Daily Telegraph, but that in this instance we mean the Daily Telegraph (London) and not the Daily Telegraph (Sydney). I support your proposal to replace the name of the parameter with "publication_title". Alarics (talk) 18:02, 2 September 2009 (UTC)


 * But see WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 10:51, 3 September 2009 (UTC)


 * If I may put this to rest: "work" is for the publication being cited, "publisher" is for the company responsible for the publication. For example, if you were citing something from Fox News Channel, the "work" field would be 'Fox News Channel', and "publisher" would be either 'Fox Entertainment' or 'News Corp'. For newspaper The Tennessean, "work" would be 'The Tennessean' and "publisher" would be 'Gannett'. Any questions? — Huntster (t @ c) 22:27, 4 September 2009 (UTC)


 * To see if I've go this right, let me illustrate with a pathological case. If I wanted to write "On August 15, 1945, my hometown newpaper published a special edition.  I couldn't. The title is reserved for the title of an individual style, so citations to an entire edition of a newspaper are not possible with this template. --Jc3s5h (talk) 23:19, 4 September 2009 (UTC)


 * To comment on your formatting first, let me correct your template: . Note that it appears the official title of the publication is just Republican-American, and doesn't use the name of the town in its title (at least, that's what I gather from looking at the current website, and if your wording reflects usage in the 1940s, I apologise for trying to correct). As for the title issue, yes, that is a problem that cannot be readily addressed. One solution would be to simply pick the headliner story and use that as the title, or you can kludge by using "title=Issue dated August 15, 1945". Not ideal, but it works, and can often be found when referencing television news programs. — Huntster (t @ c) 23:52, 4 September 2009 (UTC)


 * My best recollection of how the newspaper worked is that two editions were published each day; the morning paper was the Waterbury Republican and the evening edition was the Waterbury American. For purposes of the example, I'm guessing the extra editon was the afternoon paper. If I really wanted to discuss an entire edition of a newspaper, I would probably put all the necessary details in running text and not use a template at all. --Jc3s5h (talk) 00:07, 5 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, plain text for that would be the best option. Good thinking. — Huntster (t @ c) 04:22, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

why use the journal format for a thesis or dissertation?
Can someone explain how and why to use the journal format for a thesis or dissertation? I think of a this or dissertation as being fundamentally more like a book than a journal.

The example page mentions journals under the same section as thesis/diss, but doesn't provide an example of use. Is this really the right way to go? Kenirwin/ (talk) 14:20, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Cite paper was merged to cite journal in February 2009, as it used the exact same format, but it looks like the documentation was never updated. The journal field is optional. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * First note that all of wikipedia's citation templates produce essentially the same format (it's our own version of the APA style). I doubt that a citation that uses cite book would look different than one using cite journal. Try it!


 * If there are missing parameters or they produce a badly formatted citation, please inform the editors at citation/core. CharlesGillingham (talk) 17:45, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * I tweaked the documentation a bit to cover papers. I also made a quick comparison between the two templates and don't see any difference. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 17:53, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * If, as CharlesGillingham says, the Cite xxx templates are based on APA style, then it makes sense to use Cite journal. See page 260–1 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Even though dissertations are not journals, they are abstracted by Dissertation Abstracts International, which is a journal (or at least uses volumes and issues, as does a journal). I've quoted an example from the APA manual verbatim, then imitated it as best I could with Cite journal on one of my subpages: User:Jc3s5h/doctoral dissertation cite. --Jc3s5h (talk) 18:39, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * You almost never want to cite Dissertation Abstracts though; true enough you can cite it like a journal, but for WP's purposes, you'd almost always want to cite the dissertation itself, not its abstract. The APA manual mentions DAI, but doesn't generally promote it as the main way to cite a dissertation. You can do it, certainly, when you really only want to cite the abstract, but I disagree that the DAI makes sense of the journal citation format for theses and dissertations. (Note: I'm looking at the new sixth edition of the APA manual, p. 207-208. Jc3s5h is presumably looking at a different edition, though I doubt it makes that much difference.) Kenirwin/ (talk) 19:02, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) I was indeed citing the 5th edition, and it clearly indicates that the DAI should be cited. The choices given for dissertations are
 * Example "54. Doctoral dissertation abstracted in ''Dissertation Abstracts International and obtained from UMI"
 * Example "55. Doctoral dissertation abstracted in DAI and obtained from the university"
 * Example "56. Unpublished doctoral dissertation"

All but the last are formatted like a journal citation to DAI. So the advise apparently has changed from the 5th to the 6th edition. --Jc3s5h (talk) 22:45, 7 September 2009 (UTC)


 * It sounds to me like the templates do a relatively poor job of creating a citation for a dissertation. What we really need is for someone to research what is the best way to do it and create a template cite dissertation that formats it correctly, with parameter names that make sense and so on. Even a skeletal template would help, because it could be improved by later editors. (i.e., merged into citation/core for metadata, anchors, automated error correction, etc.).


 * If this doesn't sound like a fun project for anyone, then I would go ahead and use cite journal just to get the information into Wikipedia. Someday someone will improve the citation, and in the meantime the basic information is there and the article is verifiable, which is the most important thing.  CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:43, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Second paragraph of the lead needs to go
Over the last year, the major templates have all been merged. Also, most of the minor templates use a format that is based on the major templates. I think we can lift the restriction, noted in the lead, we shouldn't mix templates freely. (The only notable exception is Citation and I'm adding a section on a way it can be sensibly used.) CharlesGillingham (talk) 20:02, 14 September 2009 (UTC)


 * No objection, so ✅. CharlesGillingham (talk) 18:07, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Which citation type to use for a company's annual report?
Am revamping the Delrina article, and using material from their annual reports for info. They're print-only sources, so the equivalent Web-based citations I've seen on the Microsoft article doesn't fit.

I am guessing that the book citation template is appropriate, though there's no "author" or ISBN that would ever be applicable. Captmondo (talk) 22:19, 20 September 2009 (UTC)


 * That is what I have used for annual reports. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 11:53, 21 September 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for confirming! Captmondo (talk) 18:17, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

AutoWikiBrowser is incorrectly changing Cite journal
The AutoWikiBrowser is removing the p. and pp. from the pages parameter in Cite journal. Cite news and Cite book automatically add the pp. to page numbers while Cite journal requires the editor to manually add the pp. Here is the cite journal documentation:
 * page or pages:  45–47 : first page, and optional last page (separated by an en dash –). Manually prepend with p. or pp. if necessary. If you need to refer to a specific page within a cited source, use Template:Rp.

The AWB behavior was changed around June 2009 to remove the pp. from "pages = pp. 45-47" in a book or news cite. The different behavior between various Cite templates is confusing but I don't think AWB should break Cite journal while fixing Cite news and Cite book. If an article has references from books, newspapers and journals, references should be consistently formatted. I would like to get other opinions on this change. -- SWTPC6800 (talk) 02:39, 23 September 2009 (UTC)


 * It would be better if all templates were modified to require the "p." or "pp." to be added manually. This would allow flexibility to use some other appropriate word in cases where some unit other than the page is the best way to locate the material of interest, such as "paragraphs", "sections", or "lines". --Jc3s5h (talk) 02:53, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Cite newsletter?
Can anyone recommend a template for a (print) newsletter published by a non-commercial association/organization? A pdf copy is available on the web, but it's not really a "web" reference, nor is it properly "news" in the sense of media. I need a work (the newsletter's name), a title (article name), a publisher (the org) and a date. There's no author listed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:41, 7 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I would think cite journal. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:56, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

A template to use bibtex entries?
Is there an easy way of using a bibtex entry to cite a source? It's a real pain to have to copy and paste this into the usual cite templates and I'd imagine lots of people don't bother adding the complete information as a result: @inproceedings{BeJa96, author="M. {\sc Bernard} and F. {\sc Jacquenet}", title="{M}odularity and {G}enericity revisited for {PROLOG}", booktitle="Proceedings of the fourteenth Conference of Applied Informatics", address={Innsbr\"uck, Austria},       pages = "366-369",        month="February",        year="1996", } pgr94 (talk) 10:43, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Announcement: Template:Cite report and Template:Cite thesis
Templates Cite report and Cite thesis are designed to deal with the issue of unpublished reports and theses appearing published due to Conference and Journal's respective use of italics. Fifelfoo (talk) 01:29, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * We have no use for unpublished sources. Titles are italicized regardless of whether a document is published or not. Doctoral thesis normally are published, at least at reputable US universities. The documentation of these templates needs revision; perhaps the tempates need to be deleted. --Jc3s5h (talk) 01:36, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * US theses tend not to be published. The thesis indexing, microfilming, and web-archiving services aren't a publication system; certainly not in the academic meaning (a published dissertation is called a monograph, or a book, and has an ISBN).  Titles often aren't italicised.  See, for example, Chapter, Journal Article, and Conference paper titles.  See also Series titles for works in series.  Publication is one standard for verifiability, but there are a variety of unpublished works which are verifiable due to their creator: Reports printed by a government printer are unpublished, but are the result of a verification process.  Similarly dissertations held by Academic libraries are unpublished, but have gone through a verification process, and are available for consultation.  See, for example, This summary of multiple styles which indicates in particular that neither APA, MLA or Turabian modified Chicago recommends italicising dissertation titles.  Fifelfoo (talk) 01:50, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * A web page from Harvard refers to the UMI publication process as publishing. Also, for Wikipedia purposes, we tend to "unpublished" to mean material that is secret, or not reproduced and distributed. Accepted PhD thesis (or dissertations, depending on the nomenclature of the particular university) have been through a review process (the thesis defense) and are reliable sources. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * The difference here seems to be between Wikipedia's definition of published, and style guides definitions of published. (The Reliability of unpublished government reports and dissertations wasn't being questioned by these templates.)  A considerable number of theses are unpublished, Australia, for instance has no UMI system and in that academic context Library held or webarchived theses are considered unpublished by the Australian scholarly community. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:17, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * As I mentioned elsewhere, a user wrote to me that Wikipedia citation templates are based on APA style but he couldn't point to any old Wikipedia talk pages where that is stated. The only thing in the APA 6th edition index about unpublished is to section 7.09, "Unpublished and Informally Published Works." That section explains
 * Unpublished work includes work that is in progress, has been submitted for publication, or has been completed but not submitted for publication. This category also includes work that has not been formally published but is available on a personal or institutional website, an electronic archive such as ERIC, or a preprint archive.
 * The format the APA manual gives for an upublished manuscript is
 * Author, A.A. (Year). Title of manuscript. Unpublished manuscript [or "Manuscript submitted for publication," or "Manuscript in preparation"'.
 * Since the manual has different examples for government and institutional reports that are published by the government or institution, and a different example for a dissertation held in the university's library, I don't think the APA manual considers the items that would be covered by these templates to be unpublished (unless they are unfinished or informal). Wikipedia might be able to use informal government or institutional documents, but would have no use for academic manuscripts that are not available to the public. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:36, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * As for whether to italicize the title of a dissertation or thesis, I think the advice on this has changed recently for the APA style (by the way, I understand the templates were originally based on the APA style). The 6th edition on page 207 states "italicize the title of a doctoral dissertation or master's thesis." Jc3s5h (talk) 02:23, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Bah. My library only contains 3rd edition. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This actually has been fixed recently in Citation/core which many of the other citation templates use. I'll look into converting these to use the meta template in about a week or so. --Tothwolf (talk) 02:10, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Many thanks. It might be worth getting someone with the US Style guide that Wikipedia cite book style is based off to give a sample for "Unpublished" material in a Style Guide sense which is "Published" in the Wikipedia sense.  I use Turabian mostly, so I'm not good with this.  Is anyone working on Turabian citations at the moment, btw? Fifelfoo (talk) 02:17, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Tothwolf, what has been fixed? Jc3s5h (talk) 02:23, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You can disable italics in titles (among other fixes). --Tothwolf (talk) 02:26, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there (or should there be) a template for citing company minute book from a national archive?
In a number of articles (on historical railway subjects) I have contributed to, I have cite'd UK railway company minute books held in the UK's The National Archives. These minute books are usually handwritten and generally well indexed.

To Cite these sources I have adopted Cite:Book although it is not really suitable; these books generally do not have page numbers, rather each individual minute is numbered and each meeting is dated (some early minute books do not have sequential numbering, so the meeting date is the main reference). In the way I have to use Cite:Book at the moment, I can only cite a whole volume of minutes, it would be preferable to be able to cite the meeting (date) and/or the minute number, thus making the citation much more useful.

Finally a more general point, do handwritten company minute books count as 'published' sources for Wikipedia? They are (I believe) a legal requirement for UK companies and those that now reside in The National Archive or any other recognised record repository are available to the public for consultation, perhaps they do nor rate as 'published' but certainly a publically available and reputable source.

XTOV (talk) 19:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)


 * The use of archival material to create facts or judgements is original research, and the responsibility of historians.
 * When citing archival material, you need to cite a number of things. (Document). (Record Identifiers & Creating Authority). (Archive holding the record).  For example,
 * Royal Aircraft Establishment, proposal relating to destructive testing of Rolls-Royce R engines, October and November 1932. AVIA13/122 (Air Ministry and successors: Royal Aircraft Establishment (from 1988, Royal Aerospace Establishment)). National Archives, Kew (UK).
 * To refer to a document within Avia 13/122.
 * So your example might be:
 * Minute of an Executive Meeting of Train Corporation 13 July 1913, p5. TRAIN1234/1234, Document Box 142 (Train Corporation, later part of Train Department).  National Archives, Cardiff (UK).
 * thanks. Fifelfoo (talk) 22:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

References over many lines
All of the example show one line for every data point of the reference. It is much easier to edit Wikipedia if the references are given in as little space as possible without separation by an "enter". Is there a bot that will accomplish this? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:37, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Citing preface, foreword, afterword
We need a template for citing a preface written by someone who is not the author of the main work. Binksternet (talk) 15:32, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Or additional parameters for the Citation and cite book templates&mdash;my understanding is that those both use Citation/core to do the work. probably an added optional chapter-author template; then, one could specify |chapter=Preface | chapter_author=Whomever. I'll suggest this at Template talk:Citation. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 02:34, 12 January 2010 (UTC)


 * That could work. Besides preface, foreword, and afterword there are introduction, biographical sketch, back cover, sleeve notes, etc. Binksternet (talk) 02:49, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, Fifelfoo, I am aware that there are awkward workarounds. ^_^
 * Binksternet (talk) 03:17, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Strangely enough that's the standard method for citing chapters. The ugly work around is if you need to indicate that the |editor=s are editors, or translators, or commenters, etc. with |editor=Foo, Bar, Baz eds. Fifelfoo (talk) 03:27, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * What about adding parameters for altauthor, altfirst, altlast... stuff like that, for the preface author? I hate putting the book's main author in the editor slot—it doesn't help bots that may be performing searches. Suddenly, the book's author is listed as an editor. I'd much rather cite this stuff manually than use a template unsuited to the application. Binksternet (talk) 03:48, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * All our bibliography templates are nothing more than pretty printing. A bot that would trust their content is a very poorly thought out bot.  The extent to which editors abuse the fields through plain ignorance of expectations of citation far outweight the kludge attempts to get things done :( . Fifelfoo (talk) 04:08, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
 * All our bibliography templates are nothing more than pretty printing. A bot that would trust their content is a very poorly thought out bot.  The extent to which editors abuse the fields through plain ignorance of expectations of citation far outweight the kludge attempts to get things done :( . Fifelfoo (talk) 04:08, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Cit and C citation templates at TfD
The following citation templates have been nominated for deletion for lack of use and redundancy to the existing templates:


 * C web
 * C news
 * C journal
 * C book
 * Cit news
 * Cit journal
 * Cit book
 * Cit web

All are listed at Templates for discussion/Log/2010 January 14.-- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 07:12, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Relevant discussion
There is a discussion occurring at Centralized discussion/Wikipedia Citation Style. Your participation would be appreciated. — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 23:28, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

New essay on citation templates
I have written an essay encouraging editors to use citation templates. It is located at Use citation templates. Any comments or proofreading would be appreciated.--Blargh29 (talk) 07:29, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I see that User:SlimVirgin has redirected that to Citing sources, where it says "The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged." Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 05:50, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
 * It was Blargh29 who redirected the essay to his userspace. I then redirected the title. SlimVirgin  TALK  contribs 06:13, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I didn't spend much effort trying to explore this; just checked this edit history after following the wikilink above and being surprised by the redirect. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 23:16, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Proposed additions: Harvard reference, ISBN-10 & ISBN-13
I have seen the template named "Harvard reference" used, but I do not see the parameters for it. This template includes parameters like Surname1, Given1, Surname2, Given2.

ISBN numbers on amazon.com include formats like "ISBN-10: 083081776X" and "ISBN-13: 978-0830817764", but I do not see any templates or examples that use these formats. Obankston (talk) 14:34, 21 December 2009 (UTC)


 * "ISBN-10" and "ISBN-13" are deprecated, and unnecessary. Only "ISBN" on its own will produce the magic link to wp:Special:BookSources. Also, if the 13-digit version is available, there is no need to include the 10-digit one as well. See wp:ISBN. -- Alarics (talk) 15:31, 21 December 2009 (UTC)


 * And I should have added that there must be no punctuation between ISBN and the number, just a space. -- Alarics (talk) 22:00, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

I have seen the template "Harvard reference" changed in an article with the edit summary of "deprecated template, replaced: {{Harvard reference → {{Citation (3) using AWB". "Harvard reference" was changed to "Citation", and the parameters of the template after the change were identical, other than the first letter of each parameter was changed from capital to small. Obankston (talk) 05:13, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Section links
Please add links to the top of the article taking us directly to the template we want. Thanks. SharkD  Talk  03:45, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Why not permit upper or lower case keywords?
Some citation templates are picky about upper or lower case in the keywords. The "cite book" template is an example:


 * Title=
 * title=
 * TITLE=

Only the lowercase "title" is accepted. Given that many WP editors are newcomers, shouldn't the templates be more forgiving? I could not find a good explanation why some are so strict, although there is a brief mention at Wikipedia talk:Citation templates/Archive 4 it does not explain the reason. Case sensitivity is usually reserved for sensitive situations like passwords. Unless there is some compelling reason, I would suggest that the templates be more forgiving. --Noleander (talk) 16:17, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Generally speaking, all templates exhibit case-sensitivity where parameter names are concerned - it's not confined to citation templates. This is consistent with the template names - for example will not work as a substitute for . A few templates do allow a small degree of freedom with some of the parameter names (for example,  permits isbn or ISBN), but each possible variant needs to be catered for separately (for example,  does not permit Isbn or iSBN, nor any of the other twelve permutations), and to do so would mean an awful lot of extra coding, and would also make the templates larger and slower. Go with whatever form the documentation specifies - alternative case forms are unlikely to work, unless explicitly mentioned. If you know of instances where the documentation specifies a form which turns out not to work, bring it up at the talk page of the template concerned. -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:38, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
 * See also Help:Template. -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:47, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay. Thanks for the info.  What language/software is used to expand the templates?  I take it there is no "to lowercase" function available?  --Noleander (talk) 17:22, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
 * It's the MediaWiki software.
 * There is a lowercase function (it's called ), but that deals with data strings (such as parameter values), and not wikicode (such as parameter names). So
 * produces
 * thursday february 25, 2010
 * You occasionally see it in template source code; for example, includes the line
 * which basically says "take the value of the first parameter; lowercase it; take the first character of that, discarding the rest; is it the letter 'p'"?
 * The  function is documented at Help:Magic words. -- Red rose64 (talk) 18:16, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
 * which basically says "take the value of the first parameter; lowercase it; take the first character of that, discarding the rest; is it the letter 'p'"?
 * The  function is documented at Help:Magic words. -- Red rose64 (talk) 18:16, 25 February 2010 (UTC)


 * ...with MediaWiki itself being written in php. It isn't that string functions aren't available in php, but rather that MediaWiki's markup and ParserFunctions were never really intended to be a general purpose programming language. It is quite limited in many respects, but even considering all the limitations it is still capable of quite a lot. --Tothwolf (talk) 20:24, 25 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Ahhh, thanks. That explains it.  --Noleander (talk) 20:42, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Citations for news broadcasts
I have a lot of transcripts from news broadcasts that I would like to add to articles but there is no template for news broadcasts! Could someone make one? Please? (P.s. Not sure if this is the right place to put this, sorry if it isn't)PanydThe muffin is not subtle 16:09, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Is unsuitable? -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
 * It doesn't cover what channel it's on, who the anchors are, what time it was broadcast etc. etc. The tv show template almost works but again there's nothing to say what time it broadcast, so there's no way for other people to check the reference. PanydThe muffin is not subtle 16:54, 23 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Cite video? ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 17:51, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you! My bad. PanydThe muffin is not subtle 19:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Bot standardisation?
Citation bot has been changing templates from, eg 'cite web' to 'cite news', or (as here), from 'cite book' to 'Citation'.

Is this policy? Are the 'cite book' etc templates now deprecated? (And if not, why is the bot changing them?)

EdJogg (talk) 12:56, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
 * As far as I'm aware, none of these templates are deprecated. I also believe that is buggy; see my posts here, one of which refers directly to the link provided above by EdJogg. -- Red rose64 (talk) 17:47, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

I concur -- other editors too may wish to look at the bot's talk page. -- EdJogg (talk) 19:49, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Citing message boards
Didn't there used to be a cite message board template? I thought I recalled using one once which asked for "post #" and "date of posting" and all that. I ask because I need to cite message board postings from a band member who really only posts updates on his band (Wintersun) via message board. –  Ker αun oςc op ia◁ galaxies  00:39, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Cite newsgroup. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:51, 18 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, that may be my only option, aside from cite web in some form or another. –  Ker αun oςc op ia◁ galaxies  20:33, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Templates by source
The above question comes up fairly frequently, so I created this table that should help. Collapsed here for space. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 04:17, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Citing vendor manuals?
I'd like to see some examples of citing vendor manuals. Typically these have an identifier, e.g., form #, order #, a title and a date. Sometimes the edition number is part of the identifier and sometimes it is external.

Ideally the examples would show how to render multi-line subjects, e.g., should

IBM Foo Bar Administration

be keyed in as "IBM Foo, Bar, Administration", "IBM Foo: Bar: Administration" or perhaps in some format I haven't thought of?

I've been using ref tags with vendor, title lines and identifier separating by commas or in some cases run together, but if there's a recommended style I'd like to adhere to it, especially if there are citation templates to automate it. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz (talk) 15:44, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
 * See section above. Expand the box by clicking the [show] link in the first column header. There's bound to be something about manuals there. -- Red rose64 (talk) 15:54, 28 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I was waiting for comments before I added that table to the page. I cite a lot of technical manuals and use cite book which supports id. There is a cite manual, but I have it at TfD as no one can define the difference between a book and a manual. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 18:59, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Linear Notes?
I'm trying to cite a source from the Mother's Milk linear notes for the List of Red Hot Chili Peppers band members. What citation template should I use? Thank you! WereWolf (talk) 18:42, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
 * See table above (click "[show]" to expand); row beginning "music album notes". -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:25, 11 June 2010 (UTC)


 * cite album-notes is closer to APA style and supports Harvard and shortened footnotes styles; cite music release notes varies quite a bit from APA and does not support Harvard or shortened footnotes. I am working on an annotated update to the table; since it seems useful, I am going to add it to the Wikipedia page. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 23:22, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Magazines
Regarding magazines which are not academic journals, but are nevertheless generally WP:RS, such as The Railway Magazine.

If I use (which to me is the obvious template to use because of its name), this redirects to, to which an editor objects on the grounds that RM is not a "scholarly academic paper"; he suggests that I should use. I don't wish to do this, because: (a) it's not a newspaper; (b) has no provision for the magazine's editor (articles may have no credited author); (c)  has date, but not separate month or year; (d)  also lacks volume and issue, but this is a minor point. My objection to putting month and year into date is based on the observation that Harvard reference linking doesn't always work in such cases, but always works when either (a) date has a full 3-element date or (b) separate month and year are used.

Opinions please, on whether I should use or ? -- Red rose64 (talk) 13:26, 22 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Magazines are "journals" hence the redirects, even if they are not "academic" journals, so cite magazine is the appropriate one to use. As the template doc states (emphasis mine) "Cite journal is for formatting references to articles in magazines and academic journals and for academic papers in a consistent and legible manner.". I'd recommend your objector become a little more familiar with the citation templates, though I do see someone added a non-consensus based change to the cite news doc claiming it was also for magazines, which has been reverted. Perhaps that caused his confusion. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 14:10, 22 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I disagree. I think it ought to depend entirely on what kind of magazine we are talking about. The Railway Magazine is a respected, long-standing mass-market popular monthly for railway enthusiasts. As Red rose64 notes, it is a "reliable source" for information about railways in Britain. There are very many similar magazines in other spheres of interest. But it is nothing like a peer-reviewed academic or scholarly journal, and I think that it is for the latter that "cite journal" should be reserved. It seems to me that saying you shouldn't use "cite news" because it isn't a newspaper is just playing with words. It contains "news items", and the sort of factual information that one might usefully extract from it for a WP article is wholly commensurable, in my view, with the factual information contained in newspapers. Alarics (talk) 15:57, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, I don't see how it matters that "cite news" doesn't contain an "editor" parameter. If the item has no named author, you just don't put a name, exactly as with news items from newspapers that don't have a byline. As for dates, I have never had a problem with putting month and year in to the "date" parameter. Alarics (talk) 16:13, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * That really is completely irrelevant to the use of the template. The template is called cite journal simply as a matter of symantic. The community consensus agreed that magazines ARE a form of journal, even if you disagree as to their worthiness and value, hence the cite magazine template being merged to THIS template and not to cite news or any other one. Whether you are citing a magazine or some academic journal, you still cite the exact same bits of data and in the exact same format. This is the consensus of the project, as reflected in its guidelines, MoS, in general usage, and in looking at high quality, community reviewed FA articles. Magazines are not "news items" and should not use the news template. Of course, if you don't want to follow that consensus, you are free to just not use templates, but you would still be expected to properly source a magazine in the same format as any other form of journal.-- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 18:26, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Nowhere have I said, of magazines, that I "disagree as to their worthiness and value". The fact that you think I have said this rather suggests to me that you aren't actually reading what I am writing. On the contrary, I have readily agreed that The Railway Magazine (to stick with that example) is a respected and reliable source on railway matters. It is absurd to say that "magazines are not news items". Magazines CONTAIN (often among other things) news items, just as newspapers do. Both are "news sources", and should use the "cite news" template. For instance, I happen to have in front of me the following: "Lord Eccles, Paymaster-General responsble for the Arts, is considering a scheme to keep together in the capital the transport collection now housed at the Museum of British Transport at Clapham...." (There is no byline, so it was presumably written in the office by a staffer.) Are you telling me that is not a news item? It could perfectly well have appeared in a nwespaper, but in fact it is the opening sentence of an article in Railway Magazine for February 1971. If cited in WP, all it needs is:


 * "Keeping Clapham in the capital". Railway Magazine (London). February 1971, p.68.


 * It certainly isn't useful or sensible to add the information that the editor of that publication at the time was one J.N. Slater, or that that issue was Vol. 117 No. 838. With all due respect I think you have allowed yourself to be enslaved by arbitrary labels, trying to make the facts fit a scheme that has not been properly thought through, rather than designing a scheme to fit the facts: the tail is wagging the dog. If you want to play with words, what are you going to do about The Economist, a weekly that appears in magazine format but which has always described itself as a "newspaper"? Alarics (talk) 20:18, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not the one arguing that a "magazine" is not a "journal" just because it isn't academic. That is the essential argument you made above. Shojo Beat, for example, is a magazine - over 300 pages, with maybe 5 of "newsy" type items - it certainly should not (and does not) use the cite news template when cited. Your argument that a magazine is somehow news goes against the actual consensus shown in the project and by the merger of cite magazine here. If I misunderstood your argument, then my apologies, but after your remarks about the railroad magazine, you claimed "it is nothing like a peer-reviewed academic or scholarly journal". So what? That has absolutely NOTHING to do with what citation template to use. Just because it is not academic nor scholarly does not make it any less of a magazine, nor any less of a journal. Magazines ARE journals. There is little to no semantic difference in their meaning. This is not "cite academic journal" it is simply "cite journal" for a reason. Perhaps you would feel better about this templates use if it were renamed to cite periodical, which more clearly encompasses them, though that of course would then require merging in cite news which is also a form of periodical.-- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 20:48, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree that editors should use the obvious and existing. However, I have not found any discussion on where (or if) that template should redirect. The fact that the redirection target has been unchanged for ~3.5 years is not enough to claim "consensus" if there has been no discussion on the subject.

The little discussion I have found suggests there have been several contributors who do not find adequate to cite magazines. A comment in the archives for cite journal talk indicates that some people are using due to limitations of  in describing some magazine content and another describes a few using. One post in the cite news talk archives agrees that should redirect to. Other discussion shows that many authors agree that a separate cite magazine template would be useful. Further, there are well-established citation styles that treat magazines closer to newspapers than to academic articles. Less than 1,000 articles use & I would imagine that forking either  or  to cater more specifically to the needs of magazine citations would be possible. --Karnesky (talk) 21:34, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Stating that less than 1000 articles are using cite magazine really doesn't give much indication on the use of cite journal for magazines, however. Cite journal is the one listed in the citation guidelines and many editors are likely to have just used it rather than having an unnecessary redirect. Also, I'd say that there has been no serious objection nor discussion about it in 3.5 years is a valid affirmation of community consensus. It isn't as if it is some obscure topic. Actually, looking at the history now, there never WAS a cite magazine template. One person just created it as a redirect because he kept forgetting cite journal's name. cite magazine article was apparently made as a strange editing test and redirected as well. So it seems like there was never a community-backed separate magazine template, unless I'm missing one. That cite magazine's alias is used on only 1000 articles, out of over tens of thousands of uses of cite journal seems to me to be a good indication as well as the community has embraced cite journal for both. I'd certainly hope no one really thinks all of those are only "academic journals" (know for a fact they are not). I really can see no need or reason to fork of cite magazine. What, exactly, is missing from cite journal that one would cite for a magazine? -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 22:04, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * And that is the exact point I would make: what is missing from cite journal? Per Journal "In academic use, a journal refers to a serious, scholarly publication." But that has nothing to do with the name of the template, the key is the output. Cite paper also redirects here, because all of the fields needed were added to the template. If it were called Cite publication, it would do the same thing. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 22:22, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 22:22, 22 June 2010 (UTC)


 * It's not always a question of what's missing from "cite journal" that one would cite for a magazine, it may be, to the contrary (as I have already explained) that there is TOO MUCH in "cite journal" (I mean, too many unnecessary parameters) and much of it is irrelevant and pointless if all you are citing is a piece of news taken from a popular magazine. You haven't answered my question above, which is what on earth purpose would be served, in the example I quoted, by the reader knowing the name of the editor of The Railway Magazine at a particular date. Is it not obvious that somebody has just unthinkingly lumped "cite magazine" into "cite journal" without considering the different kinds of organ that can be meant by "magazine" and "journal"? As I said a long way back in this discussion, it all depends what kind of magazine you are talking about. We are looking down the wrong of the telescope here. The question that matters is, what information do our readers need to know? In the case of a piece of news found in The Railway Magazine or any one of thousands of similar publications, they certainly don't need to know who the editor was at the time, just because that happens to be a parameter in "cite journal", which might be apppropriate for a learned academic work. Alarics (talk) 22:25, 22 June 2010 (UTC)


 * I often use Cite journal for magazines that are not scholarly journals. I don't see anything special about the "journal" designation; I just use it because it has fields (month, year, volume, issue) that are useful for certain types of publications. Cite news has some other fields, but mostly stuff that I would not expect to use for monthly/bi-monthly/etc. magazines that mostly publish analysis/opinion pieces rather than straight news ('agency', for example, would be of no use for most magazine articles). For a newsweekly, I could see potentially using either template. Non-relevant fields from either can be ignored as long as there isn't an overwhelming number of them, which I don't think is the case here. --RL0919 (talk) 22:41, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Just because the fields are in the template is no requirement that they be used on every citation, anymore than you'd be expected to use all of the options on an infobox or the like. If you are citing the editor of the magazine, might be important to know, but otherwise why do you need to know the editor of ANY magazine or journal? You don't most of the time. All of the citation fields have "too many" fields if you are just going to look at the random typical citation. I don't use half the options in cite news when citing most news papers. If you're going to argue that it has "too many fields" then we'd have to pretty much have separate templates for every last possible source, or just drop them all together. Templates are made to be flexible for different, but similar sources, while offering options to handle common special situations. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 22:49, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * But most of the 1000 articles that use are citing magazines and not journal articles.  These can be improved.  Yes, it is slightly harder to treat the citations that use  (or  or ) for magazine content.  But these could be processed manually and by using a bot to make changes that are based on the magazine title/information.  You've really offered no concrete arguments as to why we should leave things the way they are other than the supposed tacit consensus.
 * To be honest: while I feel that multiple templates have many advantages, I don't feel strongly that this is a "MUST DO" or that the improvements would be "spectacular" (it only impacts ~1,000 articles). However, I object greatly to your characterization that (1) there is consensus that  should be used for magazines and the implication that this consensus shuts down any argument that Alarics might make.  Again, ZERO discussion has been shown in support of this consensus, and all discussion has actually been to object to the status quo (another example being that  redirected to  for over two years).  Per WP:CONSENSUS: "silence can imply consent only if there is adequate exposure to the community" (I admit we might debate whether exposure is adequate here) and, more importantly, "consensus can change" (I hope we would not debate this point!).  Alarics points are valid and have been raised before & discussion should not be halted just because you think there is consensus on the issue.
 * A forked could have the following advantages:
 * Parameter simplification: I think pmid, pmc, and bibcode are completely useless for magazine content (though they are included in for some reason).  DOIs, laysummary, laysource, laydate, and others MIGHT exist for magazines, but at frequencies that are much lower than for academic articles.
 * Magazines often re-publish wire articles, so the 'agency' parameter from might be useful (it is useless for scholarly articles)
 * Meta-analysis can be performed based on citation types.
 * While COinS does not have a magazine article type, other proposed microformats do. Having finer-grained types on WP would help improve data that is imported into Zotero and will help with inter-library loan requests and catalog lookups.
 * --Karnesky (talk) 23:02, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * How does it "only" affect 1,000 articles? There are tens of thousands (I got tired of clicking after 50,000) articles using cite journal. There is absolutely no good way at all to know how many of those are "magazines" versus "scholarly journal" but I'd feel pretty comfortable betting that a significant number of those ARE magazines (Time citations are common, for example). I don't see how any bot can "fix" the cite journal usage to some new forked template unless a list was made of all the journals listed in cite journal and someone manually went through and decided which was a "magazine" and which was a "journal". And yes, with that many uses, that certainly is "adequate" exposure to the community. Yes, consensus can change and if there is a proper community wide discussion that decides that the status quo is no longer the consensus, then that's fine. But to argue that there is no consensus at all because there was no discussion, to me, is just a red herring in the discussion. Nor have I attempted to halt the discussion, I am simply noting that yes there is consensus, by silence and usage, and I suspect if we widened the search, by discussion across the Wikipedia spaces regarding which template to use in X situation (i.e. the original question) versus a few brief statements that were never followed through with any significant discussion, RfCs, etc to change things. A discussion includes people voicing opposing views. I personally don't think his points are valid, but that is why I have voiced my opinion as part of the discussion. I also disagreed with his telling another editor something that is not correct, as far as I can tell, versus what the community seems to follow and believe - use cite magazine/journal for a magazine article. That was the original question I answered. That it became a debate as to whether cite magazine should now be some kind of fork is where things went off on another topic. I don't really see the advantages as being much of one, beyond the minor advantage of allowing more analysis. Parameter simplification really isn't a good reason to fork a template - there are many many citations for "journals" that don't use specific fields either. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 23:19, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
 * There are only 1,000 articles that now use . Changing that from a redirect to a new template would not impact any citation that used  or  or .  If we do send a bot to modify citations to use, that would be another (significant) advantage for having the separate template:
 * Coherency of citations to magazine articles, as they are now split across at least three cite templates.
 * --Karnesky (talk) 00:04, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Arbitary break
I still feel that if the material in the publication concerned, whatever its format happens to be, is clearly "journalism", then I will use "cite news". Time is plainly journalism just as much as The Observer is. Both publications appear weekly. Why give Time a different status just because it happens to use quarto size pages that are stapled together? Nobody needs to know who its editor happens to be in order to judge whether a piece of information cited in it is reliable or not. The name of its current editor is not what Time's reputation is based on. Whereas with an obscure scholarly academic journal, the reputation of the editor in the academic discipline concerned might be of some relevance.

Of course it is true that one can always just leave some paramaters blank if they are not relevant. The trouble is, people often don't. This all arose because I was surprised to see User:Redrose64, in the article Varsity Line, putting the following as a citation:

This seems to me to be altogether too elaborate a citation for two short sentences-worth of news, just cluttering up the encyclopaedia for no good reason. The information that Nick Pigott is the editor of The Railway Magazine is quite superfluous. Since it is a reliably regular monthly periodical, I don't see that the volume number and issue number add anything useful that is not conveyed by the month and year, and anyway it may not be clear to the lay reader that that is what "155 (1295): 10." means, whereas in academia people are probably familiar with such notation for a scholarly journal that may not appear regularly. Above all, "publisher" information in such a case as this is pure clutter. If the reader really wants to know that the magazine is published by IPC Media, they can go to the article about the magazine itself. (I realise that "publisher" occurs in "cite news" as well, but fortunately people usually realise that it's not needed in the great majority of cases.)

If I were putting in the above citation, I would do it thus:

I was unaware of the consensus in this matter to which User:AnmaFinotera refers. I simply proceed on the basis of common sense.

Alarics (talk) 07:34, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * To be fair, when I added that citation, it was in the way of, which an editor had (rightly) complained about since it had only given the name of the magazine together with month and year. Spotting this, I went for my stack of back issues (which BTW is very tall) with the intent of locating the relevant article, and providing the missing information. Having done this, I went to , took the cut-and-paste template from the doc page, pasted it into the page and filled in everything that I could. I then removed all unused parameters, but as often happens, I omitted to change the word "journal" to "magazine", so despite my intent, it shows as . Now, if had been a template in its own right, doubtless I would have cut-and-pasted a version beginning.
 * I suspect that many of the instances of being used by others for common-or-garden newsstand magazines are for the same reason - somebody took the cut-and-paste template and used it as it stood. Yes, it does have an awful lot of parameters, and I normally ignore all those after issn mainly because I don't have anything sensible to put in them: I can easily find out what pmid/pmc/doi/etc. mean, but I'm darned if I know how to obtain the specific values for the article being cited. On the occasions that I locate a magazine article on the web (such as ), I'll fill in the url and accessdate too. ref does get used if the article has Harvard-style ref linking, but those are the only three after issn that I bother with. -- Red rose64 (talk) 10:33, 23 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Part of the problem is that we have no guidelines on how to actually cite sources. Do we need to include location if other elements include it (i.e. New York Times)? How do you cite a news article sourced to a news agency? How do you cite a reference you haven't read but is used as a reference in a book you have read? Can you stack multiple citations into one set of  tags? I don't want answers to these questions here, but it illustrates a big part of the problem. Citing sources is completely silent on these subjects; it mainly rehashes reference presentation styles that are better covered elsewhere.


 * More to the point: I think elements such as magazine editor, publisher or ISSN are relevant when citing a magazine in general, but not when citing a particular article within a magazine.


 * As to the difference between cite news and cite journal: The output should be the same, the main difference is convince in parameters names. Both should be used for reliable sources, whether it is a daily newspaper or a scientific journal.


 * ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:08, 23 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Just because we do not have "one, true citation style" does not mean we lack guidelines for citing sources. I know you say you don't want answers, but some of your questions are topical & do have "easy answers".   includes an 'agency' parameter (but, as I mentioned,  is not an identical template with slightly different parameter names: magazine articles cannot have the news agency information if you use that template).  You should only cite references you have actually read (WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT).
 * Information like publisher and ISSN can be essential to locate a particular article (as some publications have the same or very similar names & because interlibrary loan request forms often use these identifiers to ensure the correct resource is found quickly.
 * Finally, while it is essential to have reliable sources in an article, not every source in that article needs to be reliable (WP:SOURCES). --Karnesky (talk) 15:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

"..... took the cut-and-paste template .... pasted it into the page and filled in everything that I could ....." -- Therein lies our difficulty in a nutshell. If people filled in only what was appropriate in a particular case, it probably wouldn't much matter which template they used. Alarics (talk) 13:47, 23 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Um, so your complaint is that you felt his citation included "too many" details? The only thing I'd have left off the same citation is location. Otherwise it seems fully and wholly appropriate to me. The version you felt was better, is missing important details re the source (i.e. volume/issue) at minimum, and is one that if I came across in a GAN or FAC, I'd oppose as being aa badly formatted source in in need of fixing. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 13:54, 23 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Um, yes, not that I am mounting any sort of attack on User:Redrose64, that instance just happens to be the example that started all this off. Have you actually read what I wrote above? About why volume/issue and, above all, publisher and editor are not needed in this instance? Again, why quote the volume and issue number for this popular monthly magazine when you would not do so for a newspaper -- newspapers also have issue numbers, but nobody refers to them.


 * And by the way, I would not leave out location, which is an important parameter in a news source, except where the location is included in the title of the publication. There might be other Railway Magazines in other countries, for all we know, so saying that we are talking about the one published in London identifies it uniquely. If you really think "location" unnecessary, and yet apparently believe that it matters what is the name of the editor, I give up. We shall just have to agree to differ. Fortunately I have no involvement with GANs or FACs, whatever they may be. Alarics (talk) 15:40, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * GAN = good article nomination, FAC = featured article candidacy - i.e. the processes that indicate what the community consider to be high quality and the highest quality articles, respectively (short explanation, best to read the pages for longer, if you are interested). I indicated that I would leave off the location for that ref as it was local to the article topic. It is also, from my experience, rare that the location is relevant to the source as most periodicals are available in multiple places. If someone wants to include it, that of course is perfectly fine, I was just noting I myself would not. And yes, issue/volume are quite important, as it aids in identifying which exact magazine it was released in (which speaks some to the note above to cite sources you've read - if you have source in hand, you should know that information). I have, in fact, noted issue/volume for newspapers as well, and would have no objection to cite news being updated to include those parameters, for the same reason. Issue/volume are standard elements for periodical citations in almost all major citation styles (as is location, really, so I probably should include it :-) ). As for the editor issue, if the article has no attributed author, then the editor is appropriate to list, but as you can't say "he must be the author" it would be wrong to list him as the author. Hence Rose's citation being, to me, the correct handling of that particular article. If the author is known, then generally, no the editor shouldn't be included. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 15:51, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

To respond to both User:Redrose64 and User:AnmaFinotera, has volume, issue, month, and year as undocumented parameters, e.g.: I agree the editor is not essential for the reference in question. Thus, RR64's initial list of four reasons for using instead of  is whittled down to only one: it is not a newspaper. It is a magazine, which is distinct from a newspaper and from an academic journal. --Karnesky (talk) 16:08, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Well thanks for that guys! Whilst I don't consider myself capable of getting an article to GA/FA I do try to provide a foundation for others to build on; so that when the article does get to WP:FAC, there are fewer problems dating back to the article's early life which might hold up the process.
 * I didn't expect this to get so heated. Sorry for all the bother... guess I'll carry on using then. -- Red rose64 (talk) 16:14, 23 June 2010 (UTC)


 * To response further to User:AnmaFinotera: "Standard elements for periodical citations in almost all major citation styles" -- yes, but those citation styles were designed for referring in academic papers to scientific and scholarly journals, not for referring in an encyclopaedia to popular magazines. That's been my whole point all along. Wikipedia is written for the general public, not academics. Quite apart from anything else, I am not sure why we expect the general public to understand what is meant by 155 (1295): 10.


 * And I don't understand what you mean by "It is ..... rare that the location is relevant to the source as most periodicals are available in multiple places". "Location" isn't about where the thing is available, it's about where it is published, and for mainstream publications that is a crucial bit of information that uniquely defines which publication we are talking about, should there be any doubt. Alarics (talk) 16:18, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but I have never, ever, ever seen a citation style say or imply "this is only for what we consider an academic work and not for magazines". I also disagree with your argument read the volume/issue number and the general public. Some folks may not care, others will know what it means (at min, most folks who have taken college classes will). This is not "Simple" Wikipedia, which is the version written for just any person with simple, if any references, simple wording, etc. For Wikipedia, which purports to be an encyclopedia, a citation should provide all relevant details for all levels of readers, not be dumbed down to those who don't care. Wikipedia articles are, in the end, a summary of a bunch of sources. The citations should enable anyone who is actually interested in learning more to be able to relatively easily find said source. Volume and issue are relevant details to that end. Those who aren't interested can ignore. If we were writing purely for the general public, contractions and the use of "you" and "we" would be perfectly fine in articles. One of Wikipedia's guidelines is to have articles written from an "encyclopedic" and that includes using valid, complete citation styles. To me, where an item is published is rarely of importance. Its the same with books. So what if it is published in New York instead of New Jersey? Doesn't change much. I can see country of publication being somewhat important, but rarely do I see who knowing the city is relevant. Again, that's my personal opinion, and per the usual citation styles, it should be included. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 16:28, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * "To me, where an item is published is rarely of importance." I've already explained why it is important in the case in point, but I'll explain again: The Railway Magazine is a title that might be used by different publications in different countries. Identifying the location of the one we mean (London) ensures that there is no doubt about it. This is exactly the same as with newspapers, where the rule is to give as "location" the city of publication, if not already included in the title of the paper. There are at least ten newspapers calling themselves The Times in different parts of the world, so if we mean the one in London, we should say so. Books are a slightly different case: there, it is standard practice to state the location of the publisher, not because it matters in itself whether a book is published in New York or New Jersey, but in case (I presume) there are different publishers with similar names in different places. Alarics (talk) 16:46, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * There is no need for you to explain it again. I already got your point. I was simply noting that I disagreed. Having a similar title really doesn't change that, again in my personal opinion. Continuing to argue it is kinda beating a dead horse. Note I also said that you were correct, that location should be given either way per proper citation guidelines. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 19:14, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, I thought it did work, but I didn't see it in the docs so I presumed I was misremembering. That should be updated. -- AnmaFinotera  (talk · contribs) 16:28, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

When adding retrieval date (accessdate)
Hi. I'm just asking for additional clarification on the best way to fill in the accessdate when using. I've seen a lot of featured articles which utilise one specific method, but on this project page another method is seemingly advised. In the example of today's date, which of the following would be better suited if, say, you wanted a featured article?


 * 1) . July 22, 2010
 * 2) . July 22 2010
 * 3) . 22 July 2010
 * 4) . 22 July, 2010
 * 5) . 22-07-2010
 * 6) . 07-22-2010
 * 7) . 2010-07-22

Furthermore, can we clarify this in the project page so there is no confusion? CR4ZE (talk) 08:38, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * There are two schools of thoughts, and the main thing is to be consistent within the article itself. One school of thought says ISO (yyyy-mm-dd I.E. #7) is still fine for access dates. The other school of though is that the access date should use the same date format as whatever you are using for the rest of the article and the main date field. So if it is an article using international date, then you would use d mmmm yyyy (#3), otherwise mmmm d yyyy (#1). In those examples, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are never correct. If you go ISO, go ISO all the way, if you go with the article format, go article format all the way. Myself, I use the article format as it seems more consistent. :-) --  AnmaFinotera  (talk  ~ contribs ) 13:47, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Agree— either the article date format or ISO is acceptable, as long as the article is consistent. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 14:05, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia has never formally adopted ISO 8601 for use within articles (although the Wikimedia developers might or might not have adopted it for system dates and times, I don't know where to look for that documentation). When discussing articles, please do not refer to the YYYY-MM-DD format as ISO unless you can get a statement that we have adopted ISO 8601 into a policy or guideline. If you use the YYYY-MM-DD format, and you also have to mention a year range, be sure to write, for example, 2008–2010, not 2008–10, because the latter could be interpreted as October 2008. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:15, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Of the examples given by User:CR4ZE, numbers 1 and 3 are acceptable depending on the format being used in the article concerned. Number 7 is OK for accessdate only, though many editors don't like it. Numbers 2, 4, 5 and 6 are always completely unacceptable in any circumstances. This is the compromise reached after a great deal of discussion. Alarics (talk) 15:06, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but I will refer to yyyy-mm-dd as ISO because that is what it is commonly called and what many Wikipedia space pages referred to it as before it fell out of favor. I do not have to have a statement calling it ISO, because that is what it is.--  AnmaFinotera (talk  ~ contribs ) 15:34, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * AnmaFinotera, ISO is a voluntary standards organization and none of their many standards apply unless they are either specifically adopted in a particular context, or adopted by the government having jurisdiction over a particular document. This is true of all voluntary standards, such as theNational Electrical Code. Furthermore, if we were to adopt ISO 8601, 20100722 would be a perfectly valid accessdate. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:06, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I know what ISO is. I am simply noting that whether you are incorrectly referring to some requirement of adoption of ISO 8601 or the like. That has nothing to do with the discussion. In layman's terms, the date format yyyy-mm-dd has traditionally been referred to as an ISO date in Wikipedia documentation, and it is a common way of referring to that date in various industries. Whether you dislike that usage isn't particularly relevant to the discussion, nor is there any requirement that Wikipedia adopt any particular ISO standard for it to follow a common practice or to have referred to that format by the name ISO. It already happened. It still happens. --  AnmaFinotera (talk  ~ <em style="color: #099">contribs ) 16:34, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

YYYY-MM-DDTraditionally referring to practices by incomplete standards names, when the standard has not been adopted, and when in fact the practice agrees with the standard in some respects and disagrees in other respects, is a terrible idea and I will not tolerate it. I will use every permissible means to fight such sloppiness in articles, policies, and guidelines. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:05, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Please note that Wikipedia practices use only YYYY-MM-DD format for the calendar date; other ISO 8601 formats are not used. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 17:30, 22 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I do not agree with User:AnmaFinotera - I tend to write the month in alpha characters ("dd mmm yyyy" in the UK; "mmm dd yyyy" in the US) apart from for the accessdate field where I tend to use the ISO format. AS long as one is consistent in doing this, there is no scope for confusion. Martinvl (talk) 17:58, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Um, not sure what your disagreement is? I noted that it is one of two accepted ways, though the month should not be shortened and a leading zero should not be added to single digit dates. If one wants to use ISO in the accessdate that is fine, so long as it is consistent in the article AND one does not change an articles existing convention (which ever it may be) against consensus. I.E. if an article already uses the full date, you shouldn't change it to ISO without consensus, and visa versa. -- <span style='font-family: Georgia, serif; color:#639;'> AnmaFinotera (<em style="color: #F90">talk  ~ <em style="color: #099">contribs ) 18:42, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

True in theory, but in practice there is usually no "existing convention" because about 90% of WP articles are *not* consistent in the footnotes, because most people have no idea about referencing, so one often ends up being none the wiser as to which to use. Quite often, the dates in the article itself are not consistent either. My usual practice is to change them all to a consistent format using a bot, which will then change all the dates in the footnotes as well, by telling it to put e.g. "July 22, 2010" (for articles about American subjects) and "22 July 2010" (for all other articles). Alarics (talk) 19:44, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Let's not have all this again (see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Archive 126 - half of that archive is dedicated to this one debate, and was never resolved; see also failed proposal Mosnum/proposal on YYYY-MM-DD numerical dates). If the article already has accessdate in consistent style, go with that. Otherwise, you can choose whether to use the YYYY-MM-DD form for accessdate, or to make your accessdates match the format used for dates within the article main text. -- Red rose64 (talk) 12:49, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Harvnb & citation template with links
I just noticed that if there are inline author link, for ex: {{cite book | last=author|year=2010|..., {{Harvnb|author|2010}} does not generate a proper link. However removing the wiki link {{cite book | last=author ... fixes the issues. Should this be fixed or documented anywhere? Thanks. --TheMandarin (talk) 05:22, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
 * It already is documented: if you want to wikilink the author, the {{para|authorlink}} parameter should be used, that is its sole purpose. For example, {{tlx|cite book}} states several times "Don't wikilink" or similar.
 * produces
 * A statement by Ossie Nock {{harv|Nock|2010|p=123}}
 * {{cite book |last=Nock |first=O. S. |authorlink=O. S. Nock |title=A book he wrote |year=2010 |ref=harv }}
 * -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:15, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
 * {{cite book |last=Nock |first=O. S. |authorlink=O. S. Nock |title=A book he wrote |year=2010 |ref=harv }}
 * -- Red rose64 (talk) 14:15, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Email correspondence
What is Wikipedia's policy on using email correspondence as a source?--DrWho42 (talk) 23:59, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Surely if the e-mails haven't been published anywhere, it is no more a proper source than a private written letter would be? Alarics (talk) 10:05, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
 * The overriding principle is verifiability. How can private correspondence be checked? Almost certainly, it can't, so is inadmissible. See also WP:PRIMARY, and in that, note 2 'The University of Nevada, Reno Libraries define primary sources as providing "an inside view of a particular event". They offer as examples: original documents, such as autobiographies, diaries, e-mail, ...'. -- Red rose64 (talk) 10:38, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Formatting error
On St. Joseph Valley Parkway, reference 15 from the Indiana Department of Transportation is formated using cite book:

resulting in: (PDF) Reference Post Book. Indianapolis: Indiana Department of Transportation. 2004. U-20, U-31. Retrieved August 6, 2010. Does anyone know why the "(PDF)" is showing up before the book title instead of after?  Imzadi  1979   →   09:51, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Its bcos of . After removing it, we get . I don't think there is any parameter from which we can make "(PDF)" appear after book title. --TheMandarin (talk) 12:52, 6 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Looks like the issue is in Citation/core where format is before IncludedWorkTitle. This should be discussed at Template talk:Citation/core. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:16, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

My AWB edits
There is a discussion at User talk:Art LaPella concerning whether WP:NBSP should be applied within date parameters of a citation template as in date=6 November 2010. It also concerns whether hyphens within titles should be changed to dashes according to the WP:DASH rules that apply elsewhere, as in this previous discussion. Art LaPella (talk) 23:11, 18 August 2010 (UTC)