Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Further considerations

Wikilinks to full refs
The combination of Harv (and Harvnb) with the "ref" parm of cite book template accomplishes this. This guideline should pbbly point to those. --Jerome Potts (talk) 05:18, 30 March 2008 (UTC)


 * It is not necessary to use the cite field. Harv (etc.) automatically links to all the major templates. CharlesGillingham (talk) 15:18, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Combining Harv template and tags
The section Citing sources/Further considerations details how to use both Harv and php ref tags together. I have always found this citation style annoying, especially in articles with only a few refs, because it causes the footnote itself to be linked (which makes the reader think "a-ha, a link I can click to read this source!" clicking on the link does nothing more than send the reader down about half an inch on the same page, since the footnotes and the references are in adjacent sections anyway. In fact, the first time I came across an article written this way, my first thought upon clicking the link was that the refs were broken and I would need to fix something; combining the Harv template with php references in this way is just not reader-friendly or beneficial.

It might be useful in cases where an article has an extremely long list of references and it would be difficult to find the appropriate reference in the list when all you have to go by is a shortened footnote. But in the majority of cases I've seen, it's just annoying&mdash;when I see "Miller 2005, p. 23" in a footnote, it's not very hard for me to figure out that that's referring to Miller, E (2005). "The Sun", Academic Press. in the list of references. In my opinion, Harv should only be used with parenthetical citations, where the citation itself is embedded in the main text far away from the list of references.

Any thoughts? &mdash;Politizer talk / contribs 19:27, 7 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree that it is unnecessary to link shortened footnotes when both the footnote and the reference list appear on the same page, in plain sight of each other. This technique is helpful, however, in longer articles, with 50+ citations. (You're criticism actually applies to linking shortened footnotes in general, not Harv in particular.)  CharlesGillingham (talk) 09:26, 27 March 2009 (UTC) (Forgive for rewriting this post).


 * My immediate thought is to quote a snippet from WP:CITE: "There are a number of styles used in different fields. They all include the same information but vary in punctuation and the order of the author's name, publication date, title, and page numbers. Any of these styles is acceptable on Wikipedia so long as articles are internally consistent. You should follow the style already established in an article, if it has one. Where there is disagreement, the style used by the first editor to use one should be respected." -- Boracay Bill (talk) 02:53, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Wikilinks to full references section vs. HTML 5
The Wikilinks to full references  section of this sub-article may need to be revised. See the discussion at Template talk:Citation. I add parenthetically that this is one example of a good argument for using templated cites rather than resorting to hand-coded HTML. It looks like someone may need to code up a WP:bot to root out hand-coded HTML cite element usage which is noncompliant with HTML 5. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 03:50, 8 January 2009 (UTC)


 * In light of this, I have moved this example lower. CharlesGillingham (talk) 15:21, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Following on related discussions going on at MediaWiki talk:Common.css and at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Example edits for different methods, I've rewritten the Using cite tags section and renamed it Using the Wikicite template. As rewritten, it describes the use of the (recently enhanced) Wikicite tag rather than . I think the jury is still out on whether WP should recommend cite-tagging titles (about which see here). Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 02:32, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

No link from Notes to References when using method outlined in Using freehand anchors
I tried the method outlined in Using freehand anchors. There was no link from the Notes to the References. The method outlined in Using the shortened footnote template did work. Vyeh (talk) 10:48, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I am assuming that this is with the page Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and the refs for Rosen 1999 and Shah 2000. I see that the present version works OK, so you've fixed it; but if you permit, I'll describe the problems with these two refs in (ie the last one before you started fixing it to use ).
 * Two of the three inline refs ( and  ) look fine, although the   attribute is redundant because the same ref wasn't used elsewhere.
 * The third inline ref has a problem, because the attribute   has already been used (in slightly different form:  ), so the content of this ref is ignored.
 * However, the serious error is in the two templates - one of these should have Rosen1999 (to match the  ), and the other Shah2000 (to match  ) Instead you have used Rosen1999 and Shah2000, parameters which are unrecognised by . Had you removed the word "name" from both, it would have worked. -- Red rose64 (talk) 15:12, 24 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much for your help. I do plan to go back to the freehand anchor style, so it is very valuable. I appreciate the effort you took to figure out the problem (even to the extent of checking my history to figure out the article and then looking at the history of the article to figure out the references. Also, I do appreciate the time it took to give such a detailed analysis. (And for finding the message I had posted to the last editor to work on the Using Freehand Anchor section. In the future, if I have similar difficulties, is there a better place to seek help? Once again, thank you. Vyeh (talk) 11:08, 25 June 2010 (UTC)
 * No worries. It so happens that not only do I have this page watchlisted, but the talk page of the other user is also on my watchlist (because I've left at least one message there before), so I spotted your question twice in quick succession. As you surmise, I poked about in your contributions list to see what you'd worked on recently; it would have saved time to name the article in your opening paragraph.
 * If your problem is with a specific technique on a "Wikipedia:" page, you can raise your problem on the matching "Wikipedia talk:" page, as you did here; if you have already decided that the problem is with a specific template, you could ask on the relevant "Template talk" page; so Template talk:Cite web could have been another place. the advantage to this is that the talk page watchers tend to include people with a good knowledge of the technique or template concerned, but a disadvantage is that the number of watchers is relatively small.
 * Two other places to ask are WP:HELPDESK and WP:VP (note that WP:VP has five sections: pick the most suitable), which have the advantage that they have many watchers. More generally, see WP:Q, which has links to those pages, and to other places.
 * Finally, you can leave a message on your own talk page, preceded by . This puts your talk page into Category:Wikipedians looking for help, which attracts the attention of people who devote much of their time to helping users.
 * Whichever one that you pick, note that generally speaking, it's best to raise just one thread, see WP:MULTI. -- Red rose64 (talk) 10:56, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Citation templates— anchors
The issues with anchors are rather more complex than documented here. See User:Gadget850/Citation templates— anchors. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 16:02, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Archive.is RFC republicizing
This constitutes broader publicizing of the above Request for Comment as suggested/requested on October 3. This RFC was started September 20, 2013. --Lexein (talk) 08:05, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
 * @Dirk Beetstra: This page is very informational in terms of what should as well as what should not be used as sources. As such, can you please readd the content you removed about archive.is, and also include a hatnote to point to the recent RFC about it? You can simply amend the language to say something like "Per consensus at (wikilink:this RFC), archive.is should be removed from English Wikipedia articles." TeleComNasSprVen (talk &bull; contribs) 20:58, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I have re-added a section on archive.is. It should include the information you requested, if not actually as a hatnote. &mdash; Makyen (talk) 22:00, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Issue with another user removing dead links and replacing them with a link to an additional archive
I'm in a bit of a quandary regarding someone else's edits. At Virginia Tech massacre, he removed a dead link and replaced it with a link to an archived copy of the material at webcitation.org. The citation template already included a link to an archived version at archive.org. I reverted the change; I believe the original, dead link needs to remain in the citation; some portions of what I've read here and at Link rot seem to support this. However, the editor has some points about inacessability of archive.org in China, and having a redundant backup, which he explains in a post on my talk page. He seems to have adopted a policy of doing this, although it isn't documented anywhere that I can find. He reverted my change, replacing the dead link with the webcitation.org link and keeping the archive.org link as the archive copy. I'm seeking consensus; if this isn't the proper forum, please advise and I will take it up elsewhere.&mdash; D'Ranged 1  VTalk  08:57, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

cite web and information specifically on an archived page.
If there is information that is on an *archived* version of a page at archive.org and the page currently exists but does not contain that information, what is the proper way to handle it. (Archived page of members of the Association of College Honor Societies has a page that contains when a group joined them, but that group has since left and so is no longer on that page).Naraht (talk) 15:46, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Tool that archives url and returns partially filled cite block
I often wish there were a tool that, provided an url, automatically archives it, and returns a cite block that's partially filled (with the url to the archived copy, title, author etc if possible)

So that I just have to correct and fill in the blanks, rather than do everything from scratch.

Does such a tool exist? I don't know where to look

Thanks! Doceddi (talk) 05:27, 14 July 2019 (UTC)

Wikilink title?
Is it legitimate to have a full reference with a ref and to link to it with a &lbrack;&lbrack;foo, e.g.,

Reference to maxim

Reference to entire

Is there a better way to handle this, given the limitations of, e.g., sfn?

Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 20:21, 19 March 2023 (UTC)